In recent weeks, I’ve found myself homebound like many other business professionals, more by choice than by circumstance because I’m trying to run my business from home and not travel all over the country like I used to do. With the Internet and modern software tools, I can work with multiple clients, thousands of miles apart in a single day.
You have been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of your clients have already called and canceled. Perhaps your community is under some government orders or voluntary instructions that restrict your movements. What are you going to do to protect your business?
So you’ve just been notified that your position is being eliminated. The company is going in a different direction. The company is undertaking a reduction in force. No matter what they call it, you’re out of a job. Here are four things to do right now.
As we approach the new year, I want to send you my best wishes for a prosperous 2020 and beyond. Not only do we celebrate a new year but we also celebrate the beginning of a new decade. Sometimes it seems like time is passing way too quickly. I thought this would be a good time to send you some suggestions on how to get the most out of your most valuable non-renewable resource, your time.
Moving leads to prospects to customers through your sales pipeline is the job of the high-performance sales professional. When there is a sales problem, the most likely reason for the slowdown is an inadequate number of new leads coming into the sales pipeline and or a jam-up of unqualified prospects in the sales pipeline. The solution to both of these problems is within your control.
Business today is filled with so much pressure to focus on things that are both important and urgent, things that need to be addressed right now! This hair on fire pressure forces us into reactive behavior based on what needs to be done right now, instead of focusing our energy and resources on developing a more strategic behavior based on our long-term goals. We sometimes feel as if we just move from one emergency to the next, never finding enough time to catch our breath and plan for the future.
Thanks to new technology that allows researchers to measure the brain’s responses to learning stimuli, the science of learning is advancing faster every day. We now know more about how the brain learns that at any time in human history. Despite all this new technology and research, there is one stubborn fact that troubles the teaching community, people will only learn to the level to which they are motivated to learn. In other words, it is a personal decision as to whether you are willing to learn something new.
Group meetings are just one of the Four Formal Methods of Communication in a Professional Organization. As a leader within your organization, learning how to conduct an effective group meeting can help you drive team participation and achieve greater objectives.
Are your salespeople getting the training they need to achieve their career goals with your company?
According to a worldwide study of over four thousand companies in seventy different countries across twenty different industries, IBM found that eight out of ten corporate leaders feel their employees do receive the training they need to achieve their career goals.
According to an IBM Workforce Study, 71% percent of the CEOs in the survey cited human capital ahead of products, customer relationships and brands as the leading source of sustained economic value.
The same study found that employees who do not feel they can achieve their career goals at their current organization are 12 time more likely to consider leaving than employees who do feel they can achieve their career goals. Even worse, this number skyrockets to about 30 times more likely for new employees.
The study reveals a wide disconnect between company leaders and training recipients when it comes to the usefulness of the company’s training. Seventy eight percent of the CEOs believe new employees in their organization are getting the training they need. However, only 58% of the training recipients feel they are getting the training they need.
Consider for a moment what is happening at your company. Does your company have a similar gap between what you think your training is providing and what your employees think?
How much do you spend annually on employee training? How much time and effort do you spend on recruiting and then, the time lost to filling the same position again? The real cost to your bottom line can be significant.
The Gallup Organization estimates that U.S. companies are losing a $1 trillion every year due to voluntary turnover. The most astounding part is that most of the cost of employee turnover is largely company self-inflicted.
Voluntary turnover is costing you money. You also know that turnover has many other costs that don’t show up in your P&L. When you lose a salesperson, there is always a transition period that is sometimes marked by billing and collection problems and lost relationships.
Voluntary turnover also affects internal morale because it may cause those sitting on the fence to decide that they too should leave your company. Remember the statistic, employees who don’t think they can reach their career goals at your company are 12 more likely to leave than those who don’t. New employees who don’t think they can reach their career goals are 30 times more likely to leave.
This is not just the normal turnover.
Gallup found that 52% of employees who left said their manager or the company could have done something to prevent their decision to leave. Fifty one percent say that in the three months before they left, neither their direct report or higher ups talked with them about their job satisfaction or how they felt about their future with the company.
Wow!
In three months, nobody asked these employees how they felt about their job? Nobody talked with them about their future? It’s no wonder that they decided they didn’t have a future with the company.
You may be thinking to yourself these statistics don’t apply to you and your company. You could be thinking, “We meet with our sellers all the time, especially every week in their one-on-one.” The real question is, are you talking with your employees or are you talking to your employees?
Here is a suggestion. Structure the format of your one-on-one meetings so that the first half of the meeting is devoted to whatever the salesperson wants to talk about. The second half of the meeting is for your agenda. Encourage your salespeople to keep a folder at their desk where they can store notes about things that are important to them. You should do the same. We call this the One-On-On Meeting Folder System.
Students of Stephen R. Covey and the Eisenhour Time Management Grind know that we all need to spend more time in the Important but Not Urgent quadrant. That’s were the truly fundamental work is done.
Now before you start thinking that the salesperson will take up too much time and you’ll never get time to run through the numbers, believe me, it won’t happen like that. You should be so lucky to have salespeople with such foresight. After the first meeting or two, you will need to remind them to come to the meeting with the things that are important to them. If they don’t come prepared, you should have some questions designed to get them talking about how they feel about work, their lives, their dreams.
It is critical to the success of your team to train your managers to have frequent, meaningful conversations with employees about what really matters to them.
Let me know if I can help. Talk to you soon.
Spike Santee Dot Com, LLC
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