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Sales Performance

Editor

Coming in July 2010

Corrections

Are You Stoking Your Organization's Middle Management Engine?

The author has long thought that being a middle manager is the toughest and best job one could have. Along with the challenges they face, middle managers have the opportunity to improve results, engage and develop employees, and build the organization's culture. Great middle managers make a significant and positive impact. Many middle managers struggle, however. Some don't know how to translate goals into actions, while others become overwhelmed by nonstop requests for their time and attentio...

Make New Friends, but Keep the Common Sense

Forty-nine percent of managers reported that they support and encourage the development of friendships in the workplace, according to a Randstad survey of 1,017 employed US adults age 18 and older. Meanwhile, only 29% of nonmanagers reported that their workplace supported the development of these relationships. As managers, they often think that if they're not blocking friendships, then they must be supporting them, says Eileen Habelow, SVP of organizational development at Randstad. Habelow w...

Barriers to Appropriate Sales Training

More than 45% of the 400 sales trainers, sales executives, sales managers, and salespeople surveyed in an ASTD market research study believe time constraints to be their greatest challenge. Difficulty in measuring the success of the training course was the second greatest challenge. Interestingly, salespeople, sales trainers, sales executives, and sales managers cite getting motivated to receive appropriate sales training as their least significant challenge (3%). This statistic should be enc...

Superior Customer Service Boosts Market Performance

Seventy-nine percent of respondents from high-performing companies think about how to help improve their customer experience on a regular basis, compared to just 69% of low-performing companies, according to the Customer Focused Organizations Pulse Survey of 607 respondents conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp). The study defined high-performing organizations on the basis of their performance over a span of five years. The specific factors measured were revenue growth, ...

More Than a Game

An Indiana University (IU) business school alumnus saw an opportunity to demonstrate his pride in his alma mater to his company's upper-level executives as well as expose them to a unique learning opportunity on IU's Bloomington campus through a four-day program developed by Kelley Executive Partners (KEP). Curt Ferguson, president of Coca-Cola for North and West Africa, brought key team members to southern Indiana over the summer to take part in a customized learning event that was designed ...

Making the Shift: 5 Steps to Becoming a Sales Performance Improvement Specialist

"What have you done for me lately?" That question is running through the minds of the sales executives, sales managers, and sellers you work with on a daily basis. If you're a sales trainer who answers this question with the number of programs you facilitated or the results of Level 1 surveys you collected, you may soon realize that the excitement you have for such data isn't shared by others. If you're honest with yourself , you'll realize that those results probably don't translate well int...

Talent Challenge: Renewing the Vision

Not since 1950 has there been a jobs decline as long and deep as that of the current Great Recession. The bursting of the huge global credit bubble has led to the first worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. These economic conditions have shouldered much of the blame for the job market's continuing woes. But there are also major problems with the quality of the U.S. and global workforces. In a recent New York Times column, Thomas Friedman asserts that a critical reason f...

Many Barriers Inhibit Success of Succession Planning

Succession planning has rapidly emerged as a significant strategy for sustaining organizational health but recent data collected fay ASTD indicates that succession planning in many organizations has fallen short of its goals. Of the 45 percent of organizations that have a formal succession plan in place, senior leaders revealed that barriers- such as inadequate funding, weak development plans, and difficulty tracking performance- inhibited their efforts. Data revealed that 55 percent of the o...

Coloring the Ideal Business Transformation Solution

Crayola, a Hallmark-owned company with headquarters in Easton, PA, realized in 2004 that it needed to replace its aging legacy software systems. Its strategy was to implement an enterprise system that would be the single source of their manufacturing, inventory, and financial data. Part of the buy-in strategy included learning, performance improvement, and change management processes, and for help with creating those processes, Crayola partnered with RWD Technologies, a company that specializ...

Comebacks: Powerful Lessons From Leaders Who Endured Setbacks and Recaptured Success On Their Terms

Engage Them Now or Lose Them Later

A small (750 employees) Midwestern US critical access hospital approached Kristin Baird, president of Wisconsin-based Baird Consulting, for assistance because employee engagement was suffering. Baird worked with hospital managers to identify employees engagement levels as fully engaged, engaged, somewhat engaged or disengaged. Baird calculated employee productivity against the hospital's wage and benefits offerings to show managers how much disengagement was costing them. This bottom line mea...

Astd.Org

Job Hunting Begins in Earnest

Despite the fact that 78% of workers believe this is the worst job market they've ever seen in their careers, workers of all ages are beginning to explore new job opportunities according to a new study by Adecco Group North America. Gen Y workers are most ready for change, according to the online survey of more than 2,200 people 18 years of age and older. Only 9% of Gen Y employed adults are willing to accept a pay cut to keep their jobs compared to about 1 in 5 from other generations.

Trimming the Fat: Using a Practical Eye for an Academic Process

So often people are flooded with the things that they must do to design effective training. In the author's 10 years of training experience, however, "must dos" and "good training" are incredibly subjective. The only thing you must do is transfer knowledge and, if you can do that effectively, then you're making good training. And that's assuming that all else is right with the world. With each step to which you're committing time, effort, and staff, be sure that it serves a purpose. This arti...

An Executive's Support of Leadership Development: Determining What Is Necessary

Organizational influence is driven by a number of factors and stems from power. The more that individuals control resources, form important alliances, and possess admired qualities, the more their co-workers defer to their ideas and directives, according to the article "Personality and Organizational Cutture as Determinants of Influence" in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The structural determinants of influence, such as the authority bestowed upon an individual by virtue of the position h...

Making the Most of Stretch Assignments

For years, we have known that one of the best ways to sustain and accelerate the upward trajectory of those with high potential for senior leadership is to place them, time and again, in new assignments that present ever-increasing levels of challenge. The demands of such stretch assignments require developing leaders to step out of their comfort zones, acquire new skills, and cope with the anxiety induced by uncertainty and risk-taking. With each new experience, these leaders grow more adapt...

One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value

Talent Management: Retail's Mvp

For an industry that depends on a healthy economy to thrive, retail remains competitive by using the ace up its sleeve: talent. Ninety-six percent of retailers identify talent management as part of their strategic planning process and 93% agree that their talent objectives are in line with their overall business strategy, according to a recent survey by Deloitte and the National Retail Federation (NRF). Survey participants were senior executives from 29 of the largest retailers in the US, inc...

Taking the Formality Out of Performance Reviews

The thought of impending performance reviews sends chills down the spines of both managers and employees alike. No one actually wants to do them, and yet, year after year they must be done. However, a recent survey shows that the benefits of performing successful performance reviews can often make the initial anxiety worthwhile. ReviewSNAP, a web-based performance management system supplier, recently surveyed 100 people to gain employees' insights into their performance evaluation processes. ...

Technology-Based Learning has Limitations

Leading Workplace Innovation and Change: Brave New Role

Trainers are usually the last to know of impending change because most of the time, only when senior leaders have made all the decisions do they turn to the training department and ask for training, usually within an unreasonable timeframe. Time after time, senior leaders launch initiatives on issues ranging from sales to systems, and they fail to produce the desired results. That applies to more than half of salesforce software projects and to more than half of all corporate mergers. When tr...

Patience Is a Virtue

The economic recession changed the way that many companies do business, but for RWD -- a provider of human and operational performance improvement solutions -- it highlighted the need for patience. There was a lot of interest in products and services, but customers had to go through a much more rigorous approval process before spending the money, which delayed money changing hands and took the sales process longer to materialize. To prepare its employees to handle the unique business challeng...

The Long View: Jean Barbazette

In an interview, Jean Barbazette, founder and president, The Training Clinic, talked about the company's training programs. According to Barbazette, in the 1990s, she began to make three to four trips a year to Southeast Asia to present trainor programs. She saw how much of the way adults learn is influenced by human nature versus their cultural experiences. Many of the cultures in Southeast Asia are very respectful of teachers trainers, and educators. The teacher is revered and you just list...

Shoot for Par!

It's safe to say that many learning and development professionals may be hesitant to roll out a training program that 99% of their team will never achieve. That's just what golf pros face -- less than 1% of their students will ever realize the goal of shooting par on a single round. You, too, should shoot for par, but luckily, your odds of success are far better. There is a new definition of par for the business world. It's time to help your team shoot for "PAR" (prioritize, adapt, be respons...

Inside the Training Courtroom

Training on Trial, by James Kirkpatrick and Wendy Kayser Kirkpatrick, is reviewed.

The Stress Effect: Why Smart Leaders Make Dumb Decisions

What's On Jean Barbazette's Bookshelf?