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Author: Carlos Vargas

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Growth Management Personal Development

Pivoting Together in Challenging Times

The first week of March, most of the talent development community got multiple calls from clients to cancel or postpone at least 8 weeks of work. It has been a challenge, and we heard things like:

  1. “This is an opportune time to train and develop. With our people at home and business slowing down, it is actually a great time for our people to upskill”. 
  2. “Our people need to lead and think differently now. How will I get our leaders aligned and executing fast if we cancel the offsite?”. 
  3. “Our leaders are not ready to lead in a downturn? How is their recession readiness? Will they be ready to adjust when we are coming out of a slowdown?”.
  4. “Leadership culture matters, even more, today and mindsets are the driving force”.

Get some ideas, best practices, and resources for the talent development community and keep your business moving forward in times of uncertainty.

Categories
Personal Development Sales

The one priority that should be at the top of every sales leader’s list

The life of the sales leader has become impossibly complicated, making it difficult to manage time and prioritize responsibilities effectively. We’ve found that one of the single most important priorities for sales leaders is to ensure that their teams are managing all aspects of their pipeline at the highest possible level of performance. Through focused coaching on the behaviors that can improve aspects of their pipeline such as deal profitability and forecast reliability, sales leaders can ensure that their teams will bring in larger, more profitable deals that meet or exceed their revenue targets – which is, after all, the ultimate goal.

We have identified seven core elements that drive great sales activity: Planning, Discovering, Engaging, Advancing, Customer Understanding, Managing, and Collaborating. When you look at achieving forecast reliability, deal profitability, and pipeline velocity, or your team’s ability to move opportunities through the pipeline, there are three elements that are key to your success: Planning, Engaging, and Advancing

Planning is what you do before a customer interaction. This might be one of the most underutilized steps, but one of the most important strategically.

Engaging is how you articulate the value of your offerings. After planning and gathering the necessary information, this is a chance to differentiate yourself from the competition by demonstrating your understanding of the customer’s business through a process called “value mapping.”

Advancing is how you advance the opportunity through the stages to a closed deal. Now, you are ready to move the customer through the buying cycle (Not your sales process). You understand where they are, what they need, and how you need to approach them.

Get the full paper and insights here

Categories
Personal Development Sales

Why Sales Training Does not work

The company’s most senior executives, Sales Managers, and professionals are gathered. The theme and content are strong. The location is superb. The ballroom is decked out with A/V bling. All of the speeches are written, and all of the slides complete.
What could possibly make the event better?

Our experience tells us that a change in information does not equal change in behavior. The enduring belief that speech-driven sales training or off-site will change behavior is unwise. While some new information may be absorbed, very little will stick—and even less will happen afterward.

The audience is undoubtedly filled with some of the best minds in your organization. These are people your company should be investing in to bring out their best thinking, leadership, and action. A PowerPoint slide fest from the stage is not enough.

To create shared ownership of a strategic initiative and inspire the motivation to execute, leaders must be actively engaged in designing the changes to come. All attendees must become active participants to accelerate the mindset shift and liberate the energy needed to achieve change.

THE GOAL? From Passive Attendees to Active Participants

See how these 6 Sales Training Best Training practices could help your organization. Click here to find more.

Categories
Personal Development Sales

Tips for a great Sales Kick Off

Every company we know of organizes some sort of activity to drive growth, celebrate success and, for the most part, you think that…

  • It’s a status symbol. You take over Vegas or Beijing to show the world how successful you were last year and will be this year, but you find too backward-looking and self-congratulatory. It doesn’t set up the future.
  • It’s for face to face relationship building that doesn’t happen in the field, but you find an open bar where people just spend time with known entities, or you find that there is forced networking with people who may not be relevant.
  • It’s a time to rally the troops around a new strategy, but the focused strategy presentation doesn’t connect the what and the how.
  • It’s a once a year platform for bi-directional knowledge transfer, but you find it passive and a one way dialogue that doesn’t take advantage of time face to face.
  • It’s a way to reward your people, build the team culture and show you’re invested, but it is mandatory fun.
  • It’s a time to help your people develop skills, but assuming you can overhaul an entire sales force in a kickoff, doing training the last day seems like the usual.

Here are some tips to maximize results.

Advantage helps leading sales organizations drive results through their annual sales conferences by focusing
both on our deep skill building expertise and creating interactivity throughout the rest of the event. We’d love to help you surface what your true goals are and find ways for you to achieve them.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

Inspire Collective Intelligence and Transform Your Culture with Multipliers

In her groundbreaking research and bestseller, Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, Liz Wiseman discovered how people’s intelligence can be multiplied or diminished (often unintentionally) by their leaders. But there are factors beyond the individual leader — especially within your organization’s culture — that can have a profound impact on whether your people contribute all of their smarts.

Multipliers book cover Our world is rapidly changing. To keep up and to create the type of workplaces where people thrive, we need diminishing leaders to be replaced by those who serve as true Multipliers, inspiring collective intelligence and capability on a mass scale. It’s immense, both in promise and deed, so let’s begin. – Liz Wiseman

Start with the vocabulary

Changing a culture means changing the conversation. And, to change the conversation, people need new words, especially words about behaviors that lead to winning results.

We designed a 3-part mini learning journey to introduce key Multipliers concepts.

Sign up for instant access to 3 quick interactive learning modules you can do at your own pace or binge-complete for a fast and easy Multipliers learning experience.

Your complimentary Multipliers journey awaits. Sign up today!

Here’s what participants have shared about Multipliers

  • “Being an Optimist and Always On can, will, does diminish my team’s potential. Thank you for immediate self awareness and the tools to quickly change and drive increased team productivity!”
  • “My aha is that this is incredibly beneficial to new leaders in the organization as well as experienced leaders. Starting new leaders off with an awareness sets them up for success.”
  • “Diminisher activities can happen due to good intentions. Be self aware!“
  • “There is a fine line between being a helper and a diminisher, and we all exhibit diminishing behaviors at times.”
  • “One aha moment from today was learning that being a rapid responder can cause negative effects on the team instead of helping move things along faster.”
  • “Love the accidental diminishes because they are so real and all of us have one or more in us. Makes you really take a hard look at yourself and think about how to change.”
  • “Fun way to learn about important choices as leaders.  Valuable to work with both multiplier AND diminisher characteristics.”
Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

5 Truths and a Lie About High-Potential Leadership Programs

Our partners at the Cultivating Leaders Center of Excellence have completed a cross-industry global research effort to uncover the challenges of high-potential leadership programs and explore gaps in identifying, developing, and measuring leadership potential.

Based on the center’s findings, the jury is out regarding the positive business impact of many HIPO programs in place today. Data from other research organizations support this conclusion. A 2018 report from DDI found that 65% of the companies they researched have HIPO programs, but more than two-thirds of them rated their programs as “not very effective.”

In light of these findings, we think you’ll find this new research report insightful and helpful if you have or are considering creating a HIPO leadership development program. Researchers Richard Hodge and Jeannie Taylor organized their findings around 5 truths and a lie they discovered as a result of extensive interviews with talent and leadership executives in some of the most successful organizations around the world.

In summary, here’s what they found:

The 5 truths

  1. Organizations with successful HIPO development programs have defined clear and consistent measurements for determining potential.
  2. The success of HIPO development programs is correlated with the level of ownership and direct participation of senior leadership.
  3. The most successful HIPO development programs are integrated with the business strategy, results, and culture.
  4. Organizations with successful HIPO development programs have implemented processes to identify and engage talent early in their tenure with the organization.
  5. The most successful HIPO development programs help people see how they show up as leaders.

You won’t want to miss their insightful and revealing conclusions, plus you’ll get a wealth of insight and best practices. Access the white paper, and we’ll also provide you with a 3-part webinar series and mini learning journey based on this exciting research.

Established under the leadership of Advantage Performance Group, the Cultivating Leaders Center of Excellence is an independent organization of researchers, developers, and practitioners who have joined together to test new ideas, develop new insights, and leverage new technologies, methods, and practices in an effort to cultivate the next generation of leaders across industries and continents. Special thanks to our participating clients who contributed to the research.

Categories
Growth Human Resources Management Personal Development

3 Critical Skills Behind All Winning Cultures

Winning cultures move beyond mission, vision, and values. Successful leaders realize corporate culture is a tapestry of the beliefs and behaviors of all employees, managers, and leaders. A recent study found that 64% of employees feel they don’t have a strong work culture. The irony of this research is that your employee is the root driver of culture.

We’ve partnered with our thought leader partners at BlueEQ™ to create a complimentary mini learning journey that can help you boost 3 skills most critical to the psychological safety behind all winning cultures.  Sign up for the journey here.

The secret to a winning culture is simply this: Have all your employees, managers and leaders focus on improving the behaviors that drive a high-performing culture. This is where psychological safety  – a factor of emotional intelligence or EQ – enters the process.

A winning culture doesn’t just happen by default. It’s created by design. Don’t take the risk that your culture will somehow grow organically over time.

Here are 3 behavioral skills that are critical to all winning cultures, what they mean, and a quick assessment to check on how you’re doing.

1. Openness

Openness means you are:

  • Willing to listen and receive feedback.
  • Open to differing opinions and points of view.
  • Teachable.
  • Free from bias or prejudice.

2. Relationship Management

High-performing relationship management means you are able to:

  • Build a meaningful attachment between two people
  • Maintain a human connection.
  • Create and sustain a social and emotional bond.
  • Build friendships and interdependence with others.

3. Impulse Control

Having good impulse control means you are able to:

  • Resist or delay an impulse.
  • Avoid rash behaviors and decision-making.
  • Exercise restraint over an abrupt inclination.
  • Think before you act.

Assess your EQ skills with our mini learning journey here.