Our Approach How We Are Different
Seven fundamental characteristics form the foundation of our appoach:
Do those things make us different? Being different, in and of itself, is not our intention. What matters to us is that we can effectively help you improve and accomplish your goals; and the items detailed below are both critical to the success of your improvement program and allow us to take pride in our work. So, you tell us if that makes us different. Better yet, tell us if that helps you benefit from our services and improve your performance.
Core to a successful improvement program is the content and expertise used to build it. To improve sales performance, some areas that must be considered are:
Buyer's perspective and concerns
Best practices in sales
Sales process development
Effective communication and discovery skills
Persuasion techniques
Adult learning principles, including the influence of thoughts on behavior
Organizational changes needed to support development efforts
Our expertise covers the entire breadth listed above. We have dedicated ourselves to understanding the most effective sales practices - and how to translate that information into strategies, tactics, and tools you can use to improve your performance.
Keen interest in learning about you
Call us learning and development nerds; but we are facinated by understanding how business and individuals operate, and how they can improve. Only after gaining that understanding can we determine how to use our expertise to help you meet your goals. Doing otherwise would be to prescribe without diagnosing. In many professions, that is malpractice; and we believe it is true in ours. It is often said that correctly diagnosing a problem gets you more than halfway to solving it. So when working with us, expect to spend time in the early stages helping both of us understand what you want to accomplish, what is preventing you from achieving it, and how to overcome those obstacles.
Patience to listen until we understand
Our training in clinincal psychology and experience working with people in general has repeatedly demonstrated the tremendous power of listening. To help you, we have to know your business and your people - your current practices, your market, your goals, your resources, your staff skillsets, your corporate culture, your history with development efforts, etc. In other words, we have to conduct an assessment.
Often, assessments are only perfunctory - if conducted at all. Those seeking improvements may rush assessments because they are impatient to get started and take action. Service providers often conduct superficial assessments because they have pre-established programs that they want to plug you into.
As clinicians say, "differential diagnosis is useless unless there are differential treatments" - meaning that assessment has no practical purpose if the treatment will be the same. The patience to listen carefully to each client - including all the relevant parties if working with an organization - is the only way to:
Fully understand what they specifically want to change
Get insight into the dynamics of the individuals and the organization that both cause and maintain the problem, and can be leveraged to help with the change initiative
Develop a solution that everyone believes will be effective and can be successfully implemented
Get both ongoing feedback to modify solutions, as necessary, and evaluate the final outcome
Tailoring best practices to meet your needs and situation
We bring a knowledge of best practices in those areas in which we help clients improve. But in most instances, best practices are only guides. They tell us how others, in their situation, were successfully able to accomplish something or address a problem. They are rarely completely universal prescriptions. Instead, they must be tailored to the unique dynamics and resources of a given environment. That tailoring is a skill in and of itself, and one in which we have a great track record and take great pride in. Combining the listening and assessment discussed above with our knowledge of best practices, together we will determine how our understanding of buying behavior relates to your specific situation, identify gaps between current and best sales practices, and develop your improvement plan.
Implementation is the key to success. No matter how good the strategy or tactics, they have brought you no value if they aren't implemented. We will work with you to develop a detailed action plan - specifying who will do what and when - so you can implement the improvements you desire. It will also include the resources or other inputs that are needed, and how success will be measured.
Based on your needs, the plan may be for a single component or for a comprehensive development program. You may or may not select us to help you with any given component. We understand that. What's important is that you have a plan, that you own it, and that you act on it.
Don't make promises we can't keep
We are very aware of the fact that change takes time and can be difficult. We understand appreciate that everyone would like their improvements to take place immediately, especially so after the problem has been fully diagnosed. Consequently, managing expectations is a critical component of our work with clients. We do not take the approach that some may of just saying 'yes' to clients so that we can get the business. Instead, we put a lot of effort into helping set achievable goals, identifying all the resources that will be needed, proactively discussing obstacles, and establishing realistic timelines. As part of that expectation management, we also only commit the resources we know are at our disposal, and help you locate and evaluate alternative sources for needed resources if we can not provide them.
We will not train you to engage in high pressure selling and we will not use high pressure selling in determining how we can assist you. Instead, we will:
Respect your time, just as we respect our own
Listen carefully
Focus on your objectives
Work with you to create an improvement plan and develop curriculum
Refer you to other resources if they better suit your needs

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