Here is the first question is how does social media change or effect the way salespeople can and should prospect? On everyone’s prospecting plan there should be a strategy for networking and in many cases, social media can be faster, more wide ranging and effective than traditional approaches such as association meetings or even trade shows. The advantages are:
You can network everyday 24/7.
You can reach a larger pool of prospects especially internationally
You can link activities together such as a blog, twitter, facebook, linkedin, etc. so one action is multiplied
The big disadvantage is that you can’t reach those who are not social media literate or willing. I’m sure today this is a large pool of people but it’s shrinking.
In adding it to sales training, I think there are a few things to consider:
Social media etiquette
How to write discussion question and other posts
How to build your credibility using social media
How to build your presence in various social media
This are just a few of my thoughts. Please add yours.
As an extra, here are a couple of articles on using twitter you might like:
Thinking about a green belt or brown belt project around training or employee development? Here’s the key. You have to think about learning as a process and not an event or series of events. If you map out from end to end how you actually learn something to a high level of proficiency, you will have the steps in a process. Consider how you learn to make an effective presentation. You might take a course or series of courses, but you also have a lot of practice, feedback and coaching required. It takes more than one role play to master presentation skills.
Once you have a process, you can apply all the process improvement tools to do four important things from a quality perspective, 1 reduce time, 2 eliminate waste, 3 decrease variability and 4 cut costs. Take just the area of variability. If everyone learn how to do something in a slighty different way, you have a high degree of variability on the job.
There is a lot more to this, but this is the logical start.
I was once told that there are two kinds of people in this world. Those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t. Anyway, I’ve heard the discussion a lot about the different between education, training and learning. Some see sharp distinctions and other see them as the same.
I remember someone recoiling at the idea of being a training department. “You train dogs not people.” To that I always say, “Do you want your surgeon to be well trained or well educated?”
It’s seems like the academic world is more focused on education and the corporate world is more focused on training. You are statements like, “the purpose of an education is to become a critical thinker and well rounded.” “The purpose of training is change what participants will be able to do after the training is over.” Maybe it’s the difference between knowledge acquisition and skill development.
In schools, paper and pencil tests are mainstays. Standardized tests which are mostly about knowledge acquisition and comprehension seem to be the level of measurement. In a corporate environment, those tests are usually meaningless. It’s more the rule than the norm that doing well on a test indicates results on the job.
So to sort all this out, you often see the word Learning substituted for both education and training. Think about the advent of the Chief Learning Officer or Elearning, etc. I look at learning as something that a student or participant does. It’s not what the instructor does. It’s good in a sense that it doesn’t suggest a particular approach or methodology.
What do I use or prefer? I tend to use them all and use them interchangeably. I actually don’t think is a very productive argument. When people argue about terms, I often say let’s just pick something or mayble make something up. How about calling it ”Bob?”
In business you here terms like coaching, mentoring or even a buddy program tossed around and used interchangeably. I like to look at these as three separate things that have a unique role and value. Here’s how I define them. A coach is someone who works with you to improve your performance. This is what the coach is paid for. This is often but not always the individuals direct supervisor or boss.
A mentor is someone who guides you through different situations sharing insights. A mentor wants you to do well but isn’t paid to help you. What and how a mentor works with you is negotiated and not mandated. With this definition, it’s easy to see how you could benefit from both a coach and a mentor. A professional golfer will have a coach who is paid to work with the individual someone like a Butch Harmon. They have specific expertise and a well defined role to play. On the other hand they might have a mentor who has been on the tour a while and can help them with things like how to manage all the different facets of tour life.
A buddy on the other hand is a peer who usually is going through want you’re going through. They have a different perspective than a coach or mentor. This is a person with whom you can share and discuss experiences.
So instead of decided which one is best, I find it works best to find a way to have all three. If you’re building an onboarding process, this is an important part.
I've sat in dozens of discussions with different companies over a basic question about new hires. Should we look for experience or hire someone out of college? This is actually not an easy question to answer because both choices have strong pluses and minuses.
Let's start by looking at hiring someone with a lot of experience. What you get is someone who can start being productive early and may need very little new training. For companies that don't have the time and patients to develop someone new this looks like a good option. However, since they are ready to go, you will end up paying more for them. You just have to determine if they are worth the extra money. In addition to all the good traits, they will also bring in all the bad habits they've learned in past jobs. You have to determine if this is okay and/or can you retrain these people.
New college graduates are more of a blank sheet. They don't have some of the bad habits because they haven't done anything yet. However, they may come with the biases of their teachers. It does cost less to get an unexperienced person but you will have to invest in a lot of training. In addition, it may take a very long time before they are productive.
In the end result, this is a partly a financial decision. Where do you want to spend your money? Where will you get the fastest return?
It's also a cultural and team issue. Who is going to fit in with the team? Who can work in the existing culture?
I've seen both methods work very well and I've seen both methods work miserably. I think it's a matter of knowing what you're really buying and being prepared for getting these new hires up-to-speed
On a gut level, you might say that kids today just don't read and write like we used to...or most adults just don't read books.
However, when you dig into it a little what's really evident is that reading and writing have changed so much that comparing the past to today is comparing apples to oranges.
Here's what I mean. It used to be that you wrote long letters to friends and family and dropped them in the mail box. In fact, a lot of history is recorded letters. The civil war is a great example because it is one of the most documented wars because of all the letters. The big change is not a decline in writing but a decline in using a paper and pen. If you added up all the emails, text messages and posts on social networking sites, the amount of writing is massively greater. Think about when congress wants another departments emails and the get several million emails to look at.
Well what about newspapers. No one reads newspapers like they used to. This is an absolutely true statement. The reality is that people are probably more engaged and interested in their world, but news print just doesn't cut it. I could wait for old news to appear on my door step or I could just go to Yahoo news and see what's happening right now. A newspaper might offer you two or three columnists on a subject while you can go on line and get a hundred different points of view. Newspapers also have to compete with 24/7 cable news and sports. I remember rushing to the paper to get the sports scores in the morning. Now I can watch the ticker on ESPN or call them up on my cell phone.
I know you'll say, what about books. No one reads books any more. I'd say some one has the be reading books because the number of books in print each year has exploded. Today about a 100,000 books are published each year. If you read a book a week, you'd be reading .005% of the new books. Hard to keep up on your reading that way. Think about all the people who used to own a really good set of encyclopedias. Their basically worthless today because if you want the knowledge of the world a quick Google search will work and you can get everything in multi-media.
So here's a good question, have we change the way we teach reading and writing to fit a new world or are we still in line with the 1950s?
Recently I had an opportunity to lead a number of process improvement sessions. One of the things that’s challenging is that it’s really a divergent/convergent process. By divergent I’m mean that early on the discussion is expansive with a lot of options. Later on as decisions are made the process is convergent leading to closure.
As a facilitator, it’s important to allow the early chaos to happen because that’s part of the creative process. I continuously remind everyone that this is a normal part of the process and everything will come into focus as we go along. A lot of people are uncomfortable with this messy state of affairs and try too soon to organize things or cut off discussion. You just have to push back and tell people to be patient. I use parking lots to help record all those ideas that we won’t be dealing with in order to keep some focus to the discussion.
I also let people know when we are shifting gears and going into the decison making phase. That’s the point were judgements are appropriate and necessary. I find that when I train others on this type of faciliation that they have to see this happen at least once to fully appreciate what really happens.
I've been blogging about accelerated learning for months now. I'm surprised by all the resistance to speeding up the learning process. I've yet to see the value of slow learning but there are a lot of people adamant about it. Remember the story about the tortise and the hare, well I've put another animal in the mix. That's the cheetah. Not only did the cheetah win the race, he also ate the tortise and the hare.
The first thing that has to happen in this discussion is to assume that the results are different but one method is faster than the other. For example, if you can read a book with 100% comprehension is it better to read it in one hour or six. The value of going faster is significant. This means I can read 6 books in the time it takes you to read one..or I could read the same book 6 times. I know you'll say that you'll pick up more of the nuance if you read slower. I'd say that's more a function of your reading ability that your speed. But again, we start with the assumption that the results are the same.
Take the example of learning algebra. Let's set the results at being able to solve any algebra problem. You know the ones about the trains leaving different stations. Would you prefer to get to this level in 6 weeks or 6 months. Same result, only the time is different.
So who might have something to lose if students learn faster? Well some might think it's a threat to job security for teachers. Indeed if students learn faster, it reduces teacher time as well. If K-12 became k-8 with identical results, that's a big reduction in teachers. The upside is that people who know more and learn faster want to learn more. So teachers could expand their offerings.
Interestingly in a business setting, learning faster is at a premium. Executives understand the costs of not having employees up-to-speed. In fact, if the training was only an hour that would be okay. It's the resutls that matter.
So in the argument about slow versus fast, if the results are the same I can't think of any situation where fast doesn't win.
There’s always talk about how to get a seat at the big table where decisions are made. Training usually doesn’t get a seat unless a company has decided to have a Chief Learning Officer or the Senior HR person is also the training person.
My experience is that the only way you get a seat at the table is if you have something to offer at a strategic level. Here’s what I propose for your entry ticket. First, you have to know what your current workforce currently knows. This allows you to answer the question do we have people trained to accomodate a strategic change.
If you are going to need greater numbers of people, you need to be able to answer the question, how long does it take us to get new people up-to-speed? Then you can answer the question about whether the timing of a new strategy is realistic. If it takes six months to get people up to speed, you won’t be ready to go in two weeks no matter what the C.E.O. wants to do.
If you’re going to need completely new skills, you can also the answer the question how long does it take to retool the workforce. With good historical data, you can show that this is often much longer than top management really thinks it is.
It’s always easy for a president to say, just get it done you have two week. But that doesn’t get it done. It just sets up failure for two weeks from now. Good data will help you make a business case about what’s realistic. Over time, they might even start coming to you earlier in the process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen executives take 9 to 12 months to make a decision and then want everything to happen in just weeks. If they’d even made up their mind a month earlier, they might have all the time in the world for success. I guess if you’re not the one doing the work you don’t appreciate how long things take.
If you were going to teach a lesson about U.S. trade, a good place to start is to ask the question, “What do you believe is true about U.S. trade with other countries?”
Write down what everyone says or a least the key ideas on a white board without comment. Whether these ideas are right, wrong or somewhere in between they can prevent learning something new on the subject.
You could expand this by asking questions like,
“Who is the U.S.’s largest trading partner?”
“What’s are biggest import from China?”
“Who do we buy more from France or Korea?”
You get the point. Now present some facts from a reliable, non-bias source. I prefer getting raw and mostly unfiltered data from places like the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the US Census Bureau. Usually what you read elsewhere is analysis of this data.
They list every country in order and then break it down by product and services area.
You can also see how much they buy from the U.S. and the balance of trade numbers.
So here’s the big question, “who buys more from us than anyone?” Do I hear Canada?
I also found it fascinating that in 2006 the second biggest category of imports from China were listed as: nuclear reactors, boilers, machinery and mechanical appliances; parts thereof
Be warned..a quick visit before you’re next political discussion will make you look like a smarty pants.
