David Bedrick

Highlights the American Society of Training and Development's study on training and development competency. Features of the study; Purpose behind the conduction of the study.

MODELS FOR EXCELLENCE The Results of the ASTD Training and Development Competency Study

Salespeople love to win, but hate to lose. And sales management applauds this drive, and wants to help salespeople win, but win the right business. The key is, the hot pursuit of a win can backfire if salespeople are going after deals that aren’t profitable.So how can salespeople, sales managers, and organizations increase win rates and profitability? The short answer: discipline!Discipline starts by clearly understanding what the customer organization is trying to accomplish—the business impact. That sounds simple, but in my experience dealing with sales managers around the world, I often hear that their salespeople cannot articulate what the customer is trying to accomplish from a business perspective. Additionally, they tell me that their salespeople have a hard time articulating how the customer defines value.These two points serve as the bedrock of a disciplined approach. Once they are understood, you can move to answer three basic questions.Probability—Will the Customer Buy Something? Is there urgency to solve the problem or any specific compelling event? Is the initiative strategically important? Many a salesperson has invested time on an opportunity, only to step back and realize that the customer has no intention of buying anything. This speaks to increased win rates, and if the answer to this question is no, discipline says to move on to another opportunity.Value—Does this Opportunity Have Value for Me and My Company? Is the potential revenue enough? What about the margins? On the cost side, how much of your time is involved? And what about the time spent by an executive or other company resource? This speaks to profitability, and if it is too low, discipline says to move on to another opportunity.Position—Will the Customer Buy from Me? Does your offer have any advantage (over that of competitors) to solving the customer’s business issue? Does your customer see the value in your offering? If the solution isn’t valued, discipline says to reconfigure a new solution or stop pursuing this opportunity.These analysis questions—Probability, Value, and Position—are intended to invite dialog within the selling organization, not inspection by the sales manager. Have a “Should we pursue?” conversation using evidence gathered from multiple sources.Bottom line: We love salespeople for their persistence and desire to win a deal. Taking a disciplined approach with involvement and direction from the sales manager will help you and your organization win more business, and win more of the right business.

Hot Pursuit of a Win Can Backfire

(From LinkedIn) -- You’ve just been promoted into one of your organization’s Big Jobs. Now you’ve got an impressive office, a hefty budget and vast expectations about how you will lead dozens or even thousands of people. Can you stick with the leadership style that brought you this far? Or do you need to recalibrate your approach, starting with the way you communicate?Some fascinating rethinking is under way on exactly that topic. Scholars such as Harvard Business School’s Boris Groysberg argue that effective leadership no longer revolves around brilliant speeches and heroic exhortations. (We can call that the Fidel Castro approach – and it doesn’t work especially well in either government or mainstream business.) Instead, Groysberg and co-author Michael Slind argue in their 2012 book “Talk Inc.” that the higher you go in an organization, the more you must engage other people in conversations, rather than trying to shout them into submission.I’m in favor of traveling 70% of the way down that road with Groysberg and Slind, without becoming so chatty that you lose the ability to stretch people’s horizons. Over the past 25 years, as a business-book author and writer for the likes of Forbes, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal, I’ve seen a lot of corporate leaders in action. Here are seven ways that the best bossses increase their effectiveness by the ways they communicate.1. Bring the vision to life. Anyone can write a mission statement, full of lofty words that sound good. But you aren’t communicating that vision unless you repeatedly signal how those values translate into concrete actions. What people learn from your routine decision-making matters far more than what you pack into your speeches.A case in point: Jeff Bezos’s insistence that Amazon.com is “the most customer-centric company in the world.” Nice slogan. What does it really mean? Hang around the Amazon CEO for a while, and you will notice that he vetoes sassy ads that mock customers. He insists that mid-level meetings include one person serving solely as the customer advocate – with the power to veto actions that undermine customers’ interests. And when Amazon reorganizes departments, which it does fairly often, each regrouping is justified as a way of serving the customer better.In the same spirit, bring your bedrock values into the daily workplace. Salute other people’s actions that reinforce what you prize. Call out conduct that doesn’t. And infuse these principles into other people’s thought patterns by referencing key values as decisions are being made.2. Ask smart questions. In his new book, “To Sell Is Human,” best-selling author Daniel H. Pink cites studies showing that when you want to persuade someone, questions can be more powerful than statements. The reason: you engage another person’s heart and mind more strongly. You get him or her thinking about the ideal answer – and then all the steps necessary to get there. By being less dogmatic, you let people on your team build game plans that they believe in, rather than trapping them in a helpless state until you issue your next command.While developing my most recent book, “The Rare Find,” I was impressed with the way that David Evans, the former head of the computer science department at the University of Utah, got great work out of his graduate students by asking simple but profound questions that pointed the way to revolutionary advances. He inspired the engineers who later built Pixar, Adobe and Netscape. Often that could be done simply by pointing at a big goal on the horizon and saying: “How would you get there?”3. Take time to read the room. Once you’re in senior leadership, you will meet a lot of outsiders that you hardly know ... but whose support or forbearance is crucial to your company's success. Do 90% of the talking, and it’s tempting to think that you carried the day with Washington regulators, Chinese suppliers, that big customer in Dallas or the investigative reporter from New York. Guess what? If you don’t know what the other party really wanted, all that bluster was in vain.Take a tip from Silicon Valley executive Meg Whitman, early in her career, when she was building eBay into a global e-commerce powerhouse. Some of her most important meetings were with eBay’s Power Sellers. These merchants booked huge amounts of business on the site, yet for a time they felt the company didn’t understand their frustrations with fees and service issues. Every few months, she would visit Power Sellers on their turf, looking for ways to fix their problems or at least offer sympathy. Her keen ear helped eBay stay ahead of its competitors.Don’t fall prey to the belief that careful listening is only for the little people in the room. When you listen carefully, you win people’s trust – and that’s crucial to everything else you want to accomplish. There’s a maxim in the public speaking business: “The more your audience talks, the more they think they have learned from you.” Use that sly insight to your advantage.Read more.

David Bedrick

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