Have you identified high-potential employees in your organization? Did you know that high-potential employees expect more development, support and investment in their future? Now that you have identified these emerging leaders, what do you do next? Customized Leadership Development allows you to offer targeted development for high-potential employees and is an approach to leadership development that involves three phases:

1. Personalized assessment of each participant
2. Development of individual customized learning plans
3. Implementation of each plan

Each customized learning plan is supplemented by the following learning strategies:

• Group learning and networking events
• Reflection and application sessions
• Coaching and feedback
• On-the-job/self-directed learning

How do you move high-potential employees from emerging leaders to effective leaders? Would these strategies help your organization?

If you’ve ever ridden the London Underground, you’ve seen the signs warning you to “Mind the Gap.” In London, the gap in question is the space between the edge of the subway platform and the floor of the train you plan to step into. The signs are intended as a reminder that you need to “bridge” that gap if you’re going to board the train without stumbling or falling.

As we talked about last time, organizations often face performance gaps that they need to bridge if they want to succeed, particularly in hard economic times. The process used to help identify those gaps and determine how best to close them is known as performance analysis. Previously, we discussed the “why” of performance analysis. Here we’ll briefly outline the “how.”

Performance analysis has four phases:

1. Performance gap analysis
2. Root cause analysis
3. Needs analysis
4. Recommendations

Performance gap analysis is simply the discrepancy, or gap, between how you want your business to perform and how it’s actually performing. In other words:

Gap:

Desired Performance – Current Performance = Performance Gap

Example:

98% desired customer satisfaction rating – 70% actual customer satisfaction rating = 28% customer satisfaction rating gap

Depending on the nature of your business and the gap you want to analyze, this phase might involve an examination of your total sales volume, your customer satisfaction scores, or perhaps the number of “widgets” your organization manufactures/processes/distributes during a specified period.

Root cause analysis is the process used to uncover why the identified performance gap exists. It involves the examination of various factors that may influence employee performance, including:

• Skill/knowledge
• Capacity/environment/resources
• Consequences and incentives
• Motivation and expectations
• Information and feedback

Some of these are more self-explanatory than others. Want more info? Here are some details about performance analysis.

Needs analysis is used to find the appropriate “bridge” for the gap that’s been identified. Depending on the type of gap and its root cause, one or more types of specialized analyses may be involved, including an analysis of audience, job function, job task, subject matter (content), work environment, or delivery media, as well as a possible cost-benefit analysis.

The resulting Recommendations are presented in a comprehensive analysis report that offers proposed solutions for improving performance results. Often the overall analysis reveals multiple problems and root causes, so multiple integrated solutions are recommended. Although established procedures are involved, performance analysis is really a customized process designed to achieve specialized solutions for unique performance issues – there is no “one size fits all” solution when a truly rigorous analysis is employed.

Is your organization experiencing performance issues? If so, then perhaps it’s time to start “minding the gap.”

All organizations seek to cut costs, improve productivity, and provide value to their customers, regardless of the overall economic climate. Whether organizational performance has problem areas or must change in response to new opportunities, thorough analysis can help you achieve your desired results.

Your company’s performance challenges and opportunities can be identified through a cost-effective performance analysis. Performance analysis is a systematic approach to identifying gaps in organizational and employee performance, their root causes and appropriate cross-functional solutions necessary to achieve desired results.

Use a front-end performance analysis to identify performance gaps and to determine how to close them. Sometimes the answers are obvious and the analysis confirms what you already suspect. More often, however, the answers are not obvious and the analysis leads to answers that are much more complex. The more complex the performance issues are, the more important the front-end analysis becomes in determining a final solution.

It is important to note that the most effective analysis efforts have been a result of close collaboration with clients (be they internal or external), working side-by-side to determine expectations, deliverable criteria and timing. Common methods to collect analysis information include interviews, focus groups, surveys, observation and examination of documents and processes.

What is your performance analysis process? To learn about The GMarie Group Performance Analysis Process, read our white paper. Then, check back next week for more details!

With the excitement and challenges of a new product launch, often the development and implementation of training are put on the back burner in favor of sales and marketing, rollout logistics, and other considerations that seem more urgent at the time. Yet the success or failure of a product launch is often tied directly to the success or failure of the training associated with it.

There are four key factors to consider when planning the training for a product launch:

1. Learning a list of features and benefits isn’t enough.

New product training is never about just the new product. It’s also about any and all existing products (both yours and your competitors’) and how the new one supplements, complements, or replaces them. In addition, new product training is about teaching new behaviors, either for using the new product or for selling it (or both). When it’s done right, product launch training often incorporates one or more of the higher levels of learning in Bloom’s Taxonomy, such as application and analysis.

2. Timing is everything.

Marketers know that good or bad timing when it comes to a product launch can mean the difference between success and failure. That’s equally true for the timing of the training. For instance, if your support staff hasn’t learned how to handle calls on the new product by the time it’s rolled out or your salespeople haven’t learned how to properly position it in the marketplace, you may find that your own employees are a bigger threat to your new product than your competition is.

3. You may be training a “tough crowd.”

Among the typical audiences for new product training are the salespeople who will sell it, and salespeople are often a difficult group to train for a variety of reasons.   Previous entries in this blog have dealt with these difficulties in some detail.

4. It’s all about change.

While corporate leaders often discuss the prospect of change in glowing terms, most people react initially to the fact of change with responses that range from suspicion to outright hostility. As the business world’s favorite fictional cubicle-dweller, Dilbert, puts it, “Change is good; you go first.” In fact, training does need to go first by addressing directly the driving forces behind the change and the fears and concerns felt by the target audience.

Have you done any product launch training? Did you deal with some or all of these issues? If so, how did you approach them, and how successful were you?

The GMarie Group focuses on improving employee performance to achieve desired results. For customer service, this means taking an integrated, holistic view of an organization and designing a program, not just a learning event, to support the transition to, and sustainment of, a customer service oriented culture.

We recognize that the notion of creating a customer focus, while a worthwhile goal and something that is, on the surface, openly agreed to by many, it may be difficult to create and sustain with so many other pressures facing the organization. Our training programs link a customer focus to the increasingly competitive nature of business and to the ultimate benefit of the corporation.

To design, implement and maintain a customer-service based culture, four areas of focus must be addressed: relevance; measurement and accountability; behavior; and policy, procedure and structure (internal and external). Tips for accomplishing these areas of focus are outlined below.

Relevance

• Create consistent messages in all training, communication, measurement and feedback.
• Use multiple methods for describing the relevance (e.g. communications, training)
• Include compelling answers to questions like, “Why is a customer service focus needed now?” and “How is our company currently perceived in customer service?

Measurement and accountability

Create a measurement / feedback system in which:

• Top level leadership supports and sponsors the effort.
• Measures of service quality are established and baseline / goal measures are communicated.
• “What’s working well” is leveraged and communicated.
• Progress toward goals and examples of stellar service are communicated.
• Managers / leaders are trained to recognize good / poor performance; they are given tools to coach employees and make retention decisions.

Behavior

Be behaviorally based in communication, training and coaching. Include case studies, examples, practice and feedback that are:

• Specific – through examples and practice that is relevant to each job role.
• Measureable – by including criteria, examples and demonstrations that are easy to measure and distinguish.
• Actionable – through practice and tools that employees can use such as job aids, observation checklists, audio and video examples.
• Realistic – ground the communication and training in job-specific examples and practice; speak in terms of skills and behaviors, not concepts and ideas.
• Time Bound – give employees goals and feedback with reasonable timelines and expectations.

Policy, procedure and structure

• Ensure that “how you get things done” is truly customer friendly, by conducting an assessment of each department and uncovering what stands in the way of providing great customer service.
• Commit to making changes so that the organization supports carrying out the desired behaviors through appropriate policy, procedure and organizational structure.
• Make it standard operating procedure to recognize and reward desired behaviors with gifts, awards, best-practice sharing, etc.

I am sure you have heard the phrase, “time is money.” This could not be truer for salespeople. Taking time out to attend training usually means less time with their clients or generating new business. What can we learning experts do to help salespeople with this predicament? If they don’t have time to come to us—to the classrooms—what can we do to bring instruction to them? Energize your sales force with fast-paced innovative sales training that matches salespeople’s energy and thirst to ”win.” Use learning strategies such as:

• Stop the small talk—jump right in with high-impact introductions. Stay away from theory and background; get right to the point with a strong emphasis on WIIFM, so your sales team knows why the training is important to them.
• Get to the point—keep it brief and avoid too many details. Have a 10 step sales process? Give them the first three steps in training, then a handy job-aid to help them do a quick review of the next 7 steps. Build those steps into their work so they are constantly using them, rather than having to refer back to them.
• Show “don’t tell”—use proof, demonstrations and points that drive the message home. You can do this with videos, best-practice sharing on wikis and company websites…you get the idea.
• Trial and error—allow your salespeople to try it first and ask questions if they get stuck. Don’t assume you have to teach them everything, especially with an experienced sales force. Make an expert handy via email or phone – someone they can reach out to with questions.

Using these strategies can help you create more dynamic learning that your sales force sees as worth their time…and able to help them build their competitive advantage. Have you tried any of these? What strategies have worked for your sales training?

Standup comedians often refer to audiences who aren’t reacting to their jokes with unrestrained laughter as a “tough crowd.” If you develop training programs (online or for the classroom) for a variety of audiences, you have undoubtedly faced your own share of tough crowds. As virtually everyone in the education and training community has discovered, some people simply don’t respond well to certain instructional approaches.

 For most training professionals, the toughest crowds of all are often salespeople. Of all the professions we’re called upon to teach, salespeople seem to be the most likely to tune us out, lose interest, or simply decline to participate. We all realize, of course, that it’s always important to know and understand our audience, whoever they are, and to tailor our training approach accordingly. So what do we need to understand when our audience is made up of salespeople?

 Generalizing the personality traits of people who hold a particular job is always risky. Salespeople are individuals, not clones, so any list of traits is unlikely to be universally accurate. Nevertheless, if we are going to generalize (and we are), there appear to be certain characteristics typically found among those who work as sales professionals, and these characteristics can directly impact how they respond to certain training approaches.

•  Typically, salespeople are competitive. They want to win.
• They are results-oriented. They want to know what they have to gain.
• They are often impatient. For salespeople, time truly is money; as learners, they are the ones most likely to say, “Get to the point.”

 If you develop training for salespeople that doesn’t take these typical traits into consideration, you are likely to face a very tough crowd.

 How about your own tough crowds? How do you or would you address these traits in your sales training?