We often think that running a business is something that must always be struggled for. We consider it to be a privilege, and something that can easily fail if the correct attention is not placed in the right areas. Of course, both points are true to an extent, but does that mean that only the most accomplished of people could ever hope of dipping their toes into the business pool? How does experience and education develop in the modern day? Is business still a hidden art that must be learned through great risk and peril, akin to a martial arts novice training on a mountain top, or can anyone learn essential business skills with the right access to resources?
We would like to think that providing the wisdom to succeed can help you not only enjoy your business life more, but give you more to think about and potentially avoid mistakes that others seem to walk in to. In other words, yes, we believe that with the right resources, most people can learn valuable business skills. After all, talent and privilege is different to skill and hard work.
Consider our advice below:
Business Blogs
Business blogs offer some of the best curated opinion-pieces, statistical analysis and news that you can find. Of course, perhaps there are some that are the most popular, such as the business journal of your most favorite news source, or something dedicated such as the Financial Times or Forbes. But if you only view these sources, you’re missing out on a lot of grass-roots understanding and inspiration, featured by people who have a true understanding of their industry and wish to express it. It’s true that business journalists often have a great understanding and research deeply into their output before publication, but would you rather only listen to journalists, or those who have current experience in the business landscape? The correct answer should be ‘a mix of both.’
Business blogs are essential to a digestible daily understanding of business. An understanding of an idea can be boiled down to its grassroots and most essential point, helping you learn the idea without having to defer them yourself from elongated business case studies. However, those are essential to consider too. You can be almost certain that there’s rarely anything new under the sun, and that if your business is in a unique-feeling position, there have often been at least hundreds of businesses that have found themselves in a similar one worth paying attention to.
Podcasts
Business podcasts are essential to listen to. Give a few of them a try! With topics as serious and interesting as these, it’s essential to find hosts that you could listen to for hours without a sense of exhaustion. Playing these during your commuting hours or downtime could help you continually learn when you’re otherwise mindlessly occupied. There are many excellent podcasts out there. Look through the iTunes store business or financial categories, or perhaps browse through Spotify to see what could be streamed. You might be surprised.
But of course, you needn’t only listen to business podcasts. There are many excellent audiobooks out there to help you gain the digest of a full book in your car, or when working out at the gym. These might include topics that aren’t directly business manuals, but still hold some water. For example, perhaps listening to the memoirs or autobiographies of a major business figurehead in retirement can help you gain some insight only gleaned from a lifetime of work and understanding. Perhaps listening to industry-led podcasts can help you gain a perspective on the industry. For example, if you’re joining a marketing team for a video-game developer, it might be worth listening to the IGN podcast, or the Giant Bombcast, both are regularly in the top 100 podcasts of any indexed listing.
There’s a wealth of audible information you can download for free, and it’s best not to take this for granted. You never know just what insights you might be given.
News Feeds
It’s essential to keep up to date. You might decide that a Twitter aggregate of accounts can be worthwhile to follow, but this just leads to an overtly busy timeline. Signing up to many RSS feeds from an RSS reader can help you assess when new articles go online, perhaps by certain writers from a publication that you enjoy, or perhaps when a new issue of your online newsstand is released. Many publications are offering digital conditions of their work, and this can also be worthwhile to read.
But these methods might be considered somewhat outdated. If you wish to get your internet marketing news in the most reliable manner, using resources such as the Amazon news services can bring. This can prevent you from having to collect everything yourself, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to truly collect all the worth around you and run a business at the same time, or fight to get your start. Sometimes help from the professionals can allow you to collate the most important news, and this can help you gain an advantage over those who do not use these services. Whatever you choose to do, it’s best to have it localized in one place, to prevent having to collect your information from way too many sources at one time. It can save you plenty of stress.
Consultants
Of course, despite our previous words, finding the right consultant can often help you avoid plenty of problems from the offset. They are perhaps the most valid and unique tool you can use to help you out of your personal situation, be that a PR nightmare you’re experiencing as a small firm or when struggling with how best to structure your departments. These fees are often higher than other solutions, but none are as customized, as dedicated to results, and as personally responsible as these. For that, they are worth their weight in gold, and that can be incredibly important to keep in mind. A little consultation goes a long way, it seems.
Past Employment & Operational Results
Sometimes, the best place to look for advice and future insight is to reflect on your past. Have you worked in industries before, at a senior level? Did you see many of the moves made by those who managed you? Did you have somewhat of a broad view of the various roles and how they functioned? While this might not give you a complete view, do not discard your experience in the past. It could potentially help you consider things you wish to emulate and discard in your effort to help yourself as an employee.
It might be reading your past business journals or project plans that help you see where mistakes were made, or where your successes lay. The more experience you gain, the further context you will be able to apply to that situation. Consider how you might have conducted the same events or tasks if you were given them to deal with now. It might be that the result could have looked much different. This will only work for some industries of course. But those it does work for will likely be incredibly supported by this view of the past. For example, events and people management, financial handling, marketing outreach and a range of other possibilities will likely be helped by this viewpoint, and that can be a truly powerful thing.
Attend Events
You would be surprised just how many business lectures, events, expos and other forms of attendable organized functions are either free or very cheap to enter. This way you can gain contact with the businesses operating today, or hear experts speak about their previous experience or current operational efforts in the industry. It’s not hard to see how this can give you a sense of participation, and potentially help you learn more than beforehand. With an online presence and the ability to network both digitally and in person, you might find yourself making friends with those who are having real effects on the industry, or at least becoming somewhat familiar with them.
Network, network, networking can often not only help you boost your presence, but learn from others. There’s something about the integrated social functions of the online space and reaching out at events that helps curate content and bring people together. Who knows? You might gain insight that you would struggle to find elsewhere through this effort alone, and that can be quite an important thing to celebrate. It only takes a moment to look for events that you could attend, also. A simple browse online should bring up many in your city this year, be that for disparate celebrations. The annual women in business conference might be held near you, or perhaps industry-specific offerings. They can all have a positive effect.
With these tips, you’re sure to find the right resources to help you gain and retain your business confidence.
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If you run a service based business or are planning to set one up at some point, then one of the key things you’re going to need to ask yourself is whether or not you want to position yourself as a specialist or a generalist.
Whilst there’s certainly no right or wrong because every business is unique and has different goals, it’s one of those things you should try to establish right at the beginning because you’ll need to be able to know how to market yourself effectively and you can only do this once you know what your positioning will be.
The thing will the specialist versus generalist argument is that people really have strong opinions on each side and as well meaning as they may be when trying to advise you on which path to take, this can really lead to you making a decision that’s not quite right for you, so in this post we’re going to share with you some pros and cons for each option, so that you can make the best decision for you.
Specialist:
Less competition: One of the main reasons that people often give when deciding whether or not to specialize in a specific area is that they’re afraid of limiting themselves and think they’ll have less chances to find clients, but the opposite is actually true and when you specialize, then you narrow yourself down to clients who are looking for your specific skills and who will happily pay more for your experience.
More money: Specialists in general will always have more earning potential because of the time, money and energy they’ve invested into their professional development, so if you have bigger financial goals and want to earn what you feel you’re worth, then positioning yourself as a specialist instead of a generalist is definitely going to be more advantageous financially for you.
Better clients: When it comes to clients, whilst it’s certainly not the case that all of them who are looking for specialists will be paying well, and those looking for generalists don’t have as much of an interest in hiring people based on value versus price, this is unfortunately often the case. The good clients who know what your services are truly worth are typically looking for people who are highly specialized in a certain area – for example, if you focus on a specialized part of the medical industry or you’re a copywriter who knows all there is to know about an electroplater.
Generalist:
More variety: Of course, being a generalist certainly has its good points, namely that if you’re someone who gets bored easily by working on the same type of stuff day after day, then being a generalist could be the right choice for you because there’s so much variety in the types of things you’ll be working on. This can be especially true for those who are in creative fields such as writing or design.
Easier to niche down later: Sometimes picking a niche to specialize in doesn’t come naturally to everyone and it takes a bit of time to find your true passion and your zone of genius, so if you’re not quite sure yet then working as a generalist for a while could be a good strategy to help you get experience in different areas and find what you want to focus on eventually.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/laptop-820274_640.jpg7991200StrategyDrivenhttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngStrategyDriven2019-04-01 20:00:002019-04-01 15:00:28Specialist Or Generalist: Pros & Cons
Video is becoming a much bigger part of the internet, with even the most casual of users viewing videos online. We watch video advertisements. We tune in to Vloggers on YouTube. You might use instant videos to communicate with your friends and followers on platforms like SnapChat. Social media platforms like Facebook and even Instagram are seeing much more extensive use of video, and it’s almost impossible to scroll down your feed without viewing an online video. We stream our favorite TV shows on mediums like Netflix and Amazon Prime. We even use catch up services online to watch our favorite terrestrial shows. More families than ever are reporting that they no longer subscribe to any traditional TV package, instead choosing to stream all of the TV and films that they watch at home. On top of that, there are more specialist video services like Twitch, which are growing in popularity all of the time.
Research from online marketing outlet Digital Sherpa shows that video increases audience understanding by 74% and around 30% of everyone’s online activity is spent watching videos. It’s easy to see why using video is important, but if you are a small business, without much experience of creating your own online videos, or using videos in your digital campaigns, it can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, description services can take out some of the hard, and more tedious work, and help you to ensure that your videos can benefit everyone. But, you still need to get stuck in for yourself. Here are just a few of the ways that your business could use video to boost sales.
To Build Trust
Building trusting relationships with your customers is essential if you want your business to grow. Without loyal and trusting relationships, you are always spending time trying to find new customers. You won’t have repeat custom, you won’t have a fanbase that spread positive word of mouth, and you won’t have clients that trust you enough to try new things and support your business through the inevitable ups and downs.
But, building this trust isn’t just about offering excellent products and services (of course, you should be doing that too), you need to provide more. Video gives you a fantastic way to give your customers more, to engage with them, to let them in a little more, and to make them feel as though you have a personal connection. Video gives you a chance to be more than just a faceless, souls brand. It makes you real.
To Explain and Educate
A brief description alone side a photo of a product or title of a service isn’t always enough to really show what you are offering. Video lets you explain your products and services. It can be a great way to troubleshoot and to give your customers advice. Video is much easier to understand than text, and many people find it easier to learn this way.
To Have Fun
Video, and vanishing videos especially, give you a way to have some fun with your audience. We focus so much on trying to be professional and serious, but it’s important to remember that people connect with other people, and they like to see more than the professional facade. Film some behind the scenes footage and let people in.
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Through our decades of business research, we’ve discovered that nothing elevates performance more than coaching. Any organization, division, or team can implement a coaching process that leads to greater growth and increased revenue. Of course, putting such a system in place requires thoughtful planning. Here are four steps to establishing a coaching process that is teachable, measurable, and leads to the creation of more high-growth coaches:
Step 1: Measure
Growth in coaching, growth in individuals, growth in outcomes, and growth in sales—these areas are what businesses are looking for when they embark on a process for improving the execution of coaching within their organizations. That is why measurement is the essential first step in our four-step coaching process.
The most important way that you can measure coaching acumen and execution is by surveying team members. By asking them about the consistency and effectiveness of the coaching they receive, you will better understand your organization’s current coaching environment. This not only helps you establish a baseline of performance, but also allows you to tailor your coaching process to better meet your needs.
Most organizations do not measure coaching, so they have no idea whether it’s already occurring or how well it’s being received by team members. Having this information will give you clarity about your company’s current coaching effectiveness and how it needs to improve.
Step 2: Educate and Train
In today’s business environment, continual development—giving up old skills and learning new ones—is absolutely critical to individual and organizational growth.
Unfortunately, too many companies view education and training as stand-alone events that will single-handedly provide what is needed to create behavior change and growth outcomes. But often, despite what is learned at an educational event, that knowledge is not applied and change is not implemented.
The education process must begin with building the coaches’ understanding of the importance of coaching. Coaches aren’t going to change their coaching behavior unless they emotionally buy in to the need to do so. It’s important that training and education is not a PowerPoint-and-quiz type of event, because you are trying to get coaches to give up their preconceived notions and make changes in the way they coach.
Step 3: Implement
It is easy to say, “Go forth and execute,” but, by default, most coaches return to old habits and behaviors. The best way to combat this tendency is to create a collaborative implementation environment that is driven by bringing together people who are trying to improve their coaching behavior. We refer to these gatherings as implementation huddles. The focus of these huddles is on the continued sharing of best coaching practices and open discussion of the challenges to overcome.
Implementation huddles provide coaches the ability to collaborate with one another about what is working and not working. They also create accountability for implementing the coaching activities, because it’s difficult for coaches to participate if they have not done the work. Moreover, they reinforce the importance of the coaching process.
Step 4: Track and Analyze
What would happen if doctors followed evidenced-based medicine best practices only 54 percent of the time? What if engineers provided bridge designs that met only 54 percent of the safety standards they were supposed to meet?
In most companies we’ve studied, coaches are doing only 54 percent of the necessary coaching activities. Further, when they are coaching their team members, 45 percent of coaches are falling short of the coaching quality standards they need to achieve in order to hit their performance goals.
By measuring coaching quantity and coaching quality, we have become acutely aware that most coaches don’t know how their actions and behaviors affect the growth of their teams. They don’t know what to do, how often to do it, or how to do it well. Because the vast majority of coaches in the business world don’t have the data and information they need, they have been underperforming for decades.
Analysis of this kind of coaching information not only allows a story to emerge but also solves a long-standing performance improvement mystery that, up to this point, has never been understood. That is, organizations would see different performance levels from teams, but the only data they could examine to explain this difference was on frontline performers. This information may answer the question in some cases, but without measurement of coach performance, there was a huge unknown variable.
We saw the impact of the coach when we analyzed data across sales departments of our client organizations. Forty-five percent of managers fell below necessary coaching quality standards to hit their sales number. When we considered the average sales goals of these coaches, this translated to $4.3 million left on the table due to inadequate coaching.
When it comes to creating high-growth coaches, these four steps, while independent, are inextricably linked. You cannot do just one of them and expect change. Simply put, if you want to build a high-growth culture, it takes consistent execution of the entire four-step process.
About the Authors
Bill Eckstrom, co-author of The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth, is the founder of EcSell Institute, a research-based organization that works with leaders internationally to help them better understand, measure, and elevate coaching’s impact on performance. Bill was invited to the TEDx stage in 2017, and his talk “Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life” was the fastest-growing TEDx Talk in the history of the event when it was released. To learn more, visit: www.ecsellinstitute.com
Sarah Wirth, co-author of The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth, is vice president of client services at EcSell Institute. She has twenty years of experience in employee assessment, leadership development, sales executive coaching, and customer service. She has advised executives from across the globe, consulting with such organizations as Mercedes-Benz, Estee Lauder, Ritz-Carlton, The Cheesecake Factory, and many more. To learn more, visit: www.ecsellinstitute.com
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When my children were taking violin lessons and were given a new piece to learn, they would start from the beginning and race through the song at breakneck speed. One day, their teacher offered an insight that radically altered how they were able to progress. He told them that if they wanted to play fast, they would first have to practice slow. Similarly, taking the time to slow down and plan improvements to workplace culture also produces more effective results down the line.
Workplace culture isn’t something you can instantly fix, swap out, or quickly reboot. It’s not like a used car you can trade in when it no longer runs smoothly. Culture change requires culture work – and success necessitates effort and attention. Rather than being daunted by this task, we need to take a breath, slow down, and intentionally chart our course forward.
We recently worked with an organization who took the advice to slow down and take the time to invest in their long-term workplace culture to heart. Their decision was precipitated by a harassment complaint that revealed many layers of dysfunction – they could no longer ignore the impact their unhealthy culture was having.
Management was distant and unaware of the tension between employees, staff turnover was high, valued customers were leaving, and the human resources department admitted they were overwhelmed with the flood of complaints. The task of improving their workplace seemed enormous, but they decided to roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Senior management started by doing a cultural assessment and mapping out a plan. They began with a number of simple fixes to jumpstart the process. They revamped their respectful workplace policy, as well as held a training day for all staff to inform them of the current cultural assessment. Supervisors and management began joining employees in the common area during breaks.
To begin the long-term work of culture change, the organization initiated dialogue with staff and instituted weekly check-ins. They also revamped their performance management process to include a quarterly focus on employees’ goals, and provided all supervisors with training on conflict resolution and how to give effective feedback. These, along with a number of other changes, started to slowly shift their workplace culture in the right direction.
Now several months into the process, they are beginning to see the positive results! Staff are happier and more engaged, which has led to better productivity and an improvement in the quality of work being done. Their human resources department feels supported by management, and complaints have dropped as supervisors gain confidence in their ability to coach and support employees.
This organization realized that it would take time to replace the unhealthy culture with a healthy one, and that it couldn’t happen all at once. As a result of their patient and intentional work, they have seen a slow but marked improvement in their culture.
Culture is often so ingrained that people take it for granted. When we recognize that there are long-standing issues that we need to address, the work ahead can feel overwhelming, but culture won’t be improved with one-off initiatives like taco Tuesday or yearly surveys. Culture develops over time, and therefore takes time to change. Taking small steps to create a culture that will become the new standard may feel like slow work, but the rewards of a healthier culture are more than worth the wait.
About the Author
Wendy Loewen is a mediator, facilitator, and the Training Development Specialist at ACHIEVE Centre for Leadership & Workplace Performance. She is co-author of the book, The Culture Question, and is the author of many ACHIEVE workshops including Respectful Workplace, Assertive Communication, and Performance Management. In her work as a mediator, speaker, and facilitator, she is committed to helping organizations create dynamic and engaging places of work where people care about each other, are productive, and deliver quality services and products. Wendy believes that learning is a dynamic and life-long endeavor, and with commitment, guidance, and individualized support, this process should be enjoyable and motivating.
https://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/Culture-Question_cover.jpg18501200Sharon Kastorianohttps://www.strategydriven.com/wp-content/uploads/SDELogo5-300x70-300x70.pngSharon Kastoriano2019-03-29 11:00:402019-03-29 22:21:39Culture Change – Slow Down to Go Fast
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Business Programs
Can Anyone Become Competent At Business With The Right Resources?
/in Entrepreneurship/by StrategyDrivenWe would like to think that providing the wisdom to succeed can help you not only enjoy your business life more, but give you more to think about and potentially avoid mistakes that others seem to walk in to. In other words, yes, we believe that with the right resources, most people can learn valuable business skills. After all, talent and privilege is different to skill and hard work.
Consider our advice below:
Business Blogs
Business blogs offer some of the best curated opinion-pieces, statistical analysis and news that you can find. Of course, perhaps there are some that are the most popular, such as the business journal of your most favorite news source, or something dedicated such as the Financial Times or Forbes. But if you only view these sources, you’re missing out on a lot of grass-roots understanding and inspiration, featured by people who have a true understanding of their industry and wish to express it. It’s true that business journalists often have a great understanding and research deeply into their output before publication, but would you rather only listen to journalists, or those who have current experience in the business landscape? The correct answer should be ‘a mix of both.’
Business blogs are essential to a digestible daily understanding of business. An understanding of an idea can be boiled down to its grassroots and most essential point, helping you learn the idea without having to defer them yourself from elongated business case studies. However, those are essential to consider too. You can be almost certain that there’s rarely anything new under the sun, and that if your business is in a unique-feeling position, there have often been at least hundreds of businesses that have found themselves in a similar one worth paying attention to.
Podcasts
Business podcasts are essential to listen to. Give a few of them a try! With topics as serious and interesting as these, it’s essential to find hosts that you could listen to for hours without a sense of exhaustion. Playing these during your commuting hours or downtime could help you continually learn when you’re otherwise mindlessly occupied. There are many excellent podcasts out there. Look through the iTunes store business or financial categories, or perhaps browse through Spotify to see what could be streamed. You might be surprised.
But of course, you needn’t only listen to business podcasts. There are many excellent audiobooks out there to help you gain the digest of a full book in your car, or when working out at the gym. These might include topics that aren’t directly business manuals, but still hold some water. For example, perhaps listening to the memoirs or autobiographies of a major business figurehead in retirement can help you gain some insight only gleaned from a lifetime of work and understanding. Perhaps listening to industry-led podcasts can help you gain a perspective on the industry. For example, if you’re joining a marketing team for a video-game developer, it might be worth listening to the IGN podcast, or the Giant Bombcast, both are regularly in the top 100 podcasts of any indexed listing.
There’s a wealth of audible information you can download for free, and it’s best not to take this for granted. You never know just what insights you might be given.
News Feeds
It’s essential to keep up to date. You might decide that a Twitter aggregate of accounts can be worthwhile to follow, but this just leads to an overtly busy timeline. Signing up to many RSS feeds from an RSS reader can help you assess when new articles go online, perhaps by certain writers from a publication that you enjoy, or perhaps when a new issue of your online newsstand is released. Many publications are offering digital conditions of their work, and this can also be worthwhile to read.
But these methods might be considered somewhat outdated. If you wish to get your internet marketing news in the most reliable manner, using resources such as the Amazon news services can bring. This can prevent you from having to collect everything yourself, because no matter how hard you try, you’ll never be able to truly collect all the worth around you and run a business at the same time, or fight to get your start. Sometimes help from the professionals can allow you to collate the most important news, and this can help you gain an advantage over those who do not use these services. Whatever you choose to do, it’s best to have it localized in one place, to prevent having to collect your information from way too many sources at one time. It can save you plenty of stress.
Consultants
Of course, despite our previous words, finding the right consultant can often help you avoid plenty of problems from the offset. They are perhaps the most valid and unique tool you can use to help you out of your personal situation, be that a PR nightmare you’re experiencing as a small firm or when struggling with how best to structure your departments. These fees are often higher than other solutions, but none are as customized, as dedicated to results, and as personally responsible as these. For that, they are worth their weight in gold, and that can be incredibly important to keep in mind. A little consultation goes a long way, it seems.
Past Employment & Operational Results
Sometimes, the best place to look for advice and future insight is to reflect on your past. Have you worked in industries before, at a senior level? Did you see many of the moves made by those who managed you? Did you have somewhat of a broad view of the various roles and how they functioned? While this might not give you a complete view, do not discard your experience in the past. It could potentially help you consider things you wish to emulate and discard in your effort to help yourself as an employee.
It might be reading your past business journals or project plans that help you see where mistakes were made, or where your successes lay. The more experience you gain, the further context you will be able to apply to that situation. Consider how you might have conducted the same events or tasks if you were given them to deal with now. It might be that the result could have looked much different. This will only work for some industries of course. But those it does work for will likely be incredibly supported by this view of the past. For example, events and people management, financial handling, marketing outreach and a range of other possibilities will likely be helped by this viewpoint, and that can be a truly powerful thing.
Attend Events
You would be surprised just how many business lectures, events, expos and other forms of attendable organized functions are either free or very cheap to enter. This way you can gain contact with the businesses operating today, or hear experts speak about their previous experience or current operational efforts in the industry. It’s not hard to see how this can give you a sense of participation, and potentially help you learn more than beforehand. With an online presence and the ability to network both digitally and in person, you might find yourself making friends with those who are having real effects on the industry, or at least becoming somewhat familiar with them.
Network, network, networking can often not only help you boost your presence, but learn from others. There’s something about the integrated social functions of the online space and reaching out at events that helps curate content and bring people together. Who knows? You might gain insight that you would struggle to find elsewhere through this effort alone, and that can be quite an important thing to celebrate. It only takes a moment to look for events that you could attend, also. A simple browse online should bring up many in your city this year, be that for disparate celebrations. The annual women in business conference might be held near you, or perhaps industry-specific offerings. They can all have a positive effect.
With these tips, you’re sure to find the right resources to help you gain and retain your business confidence.
Specialist Or Generalist: Pros & Cons
/in Practices for Professionals/by StrategyDrivenWhilst there’s certainly no right or wrong because every business is unique and has different goals, it’s one of those things you should try to establish right at the beginning because you’ll need to be able to know how to market yourself effectively and you can only do this once you know what your positioning will be.
The thing will the specialist versus generalist argument is that people really have strong opinions on each side and as well meaning as they may be when trying to advise you on which path to take, this can really lead to you making a decision that’s not quite right for you, so in this post we’re going to share with you some pros and cons for each option, so that you can make the best decision for you.
Specialist:
Generalist:
Using Video to Boost Online Sales
/in Online Marketing and Website Development/by StrategyDrivenResearch from online marketing outlet Digital Sherpa shows that video increases audience understanding by 74% and around 30% of everyone’s online activity is spent watching videos. It’s easy to see why using video is important, but if you are a small business, without much experience of creating your own online videos, or using videos in your digital campaigns, it can be a little overwhelming. Fortunately, description services can take out some of the hard, and more tedious work, and help you to ensure that your videos can benefit everyone. But, you still need to get stuck in for yourself. Here are just a few of the ways that your business could use video to boost sales.
To Build Trust
Building trusting relationships with your customers is essential if you want your business to grow. Without loyal and trusting relationships, you are always spending time trying to find new customers. You won’t have repeat custom, you won’t have a fanbase that spread positive word of mouth, and you won’t have clients that trust you enough to try new things and support your business through the inevitable ups and downs.
But, building this trust isn’t just about offering excellent products and services (of course, you should be doing that too), you need to provide more. Video gives you a fantastic way to give your customers more, to engage with them, to let them in a little more, and to make them feel as though you have a personal connection. Video gives you a chance to be more than just a faceless, souls brand. It makes you real.
To Explain and Educate
A brief description alone side a photo of a product or title of a service isn’t always enough to really show what you are offering. Video lets you explain your products and services. It can be a great way to troubleshoot and to give your customers advice. Video is much easier to understand than text, and many people find it easier to learn this way.
To Have Fun
Video, and vanishing videos especially, give you a way to have some fun with your audience. We focus so much on trying to be professional and serious, but it’s important to remember that people connect with other people, and they like to see more than the professional facade. Film some behind the scenes footage and let people in.
Turn Your Managers Into High-Growth Coaches With These 4 Steps
/in Talent Management/by Bill Eckstrom and Sarah WirthStep 1: Measure
Growth in coaching, growth in individuals, growth in outcomes, and growth in sales—these areas are what businesses are looking for when they embark on a process for improving the execution of coaching within their organizations. That is why measurement is the essential first step in our four-step coaching process.
The most important way that you can measure coaching acumen and execution is by surveying team members. By asking them about the consistency and effectiveness of the coaching they receive, you will better understand your organization’s current coaching environment. This not only helps you establish a baseline of performance, but also allows you to tailor your coaching process to better meet your needs.
Most organizations do not measure coaching, so they have no idea whether it’s already occurring or how well it’s being received by team members. Having this information will give you clarity about your company’s current coaching effectiveness and how it needs to improve.
Step 2: Educate and Train
In today’s business environment, continual development—giving up old skills and learning new ones—is absolutely critical to individual and organizational growth.
Unfortunately, too many companies view education and training as stand-alone events that will single-handedly provide what is needed to create behavior change and growth outcomes. But often, despite what is learned at an educational event, that knowledge is not applied and change is not implemented.
The education process must begin with building the coaches’ understanding of the importance of coaching. Coaches aren’t going to change their coaching behavior unless they emotionally buy in to the need to do so. It’s important that training and education is not a PowerPoint-and-quiz type of event, because you are trying to get coaches to give up their preconceived notions and make changes in the way they coach.
Step 3: Implement
It is easy to say, “Go forth and execute,” but, by default, most coaches return to old habits and behaviors. The best way to combat this tendency is to create a collaborative implementation environment that is driven by bringing together people who are trying to improve their coaching behavior. We refer to these gatherings as implementation huddles. The focus of these huddles is on the continued sharing of best coaching practices and open discussion of the challenges to overcome.
Implementation huddles provide coaches the ability to collaborate with one another about what is working and not working. They also create accountability for implementing the coaching activities, because it’s difficult for coaches to participate if they have not done the work. Moreover, they reinforce the importance of the coaching process.
Step 4: Track and Analyze
What would happen if doctors followed evidenced-based medicine best practices only 54 percent of the time? What if engineers provided bridge designs that met only 54 percent of the safety standards they were supposed to meet?
In most companies we’ve studied, coaches are doing only 54 percent of the necessary coaching activities. Further, when they are coaching their team members, 45 percent of coaches are falling short of the coaching quality standards they need to achieve in order to hit their performance goals.
By measuring coaching quantity and coaching quality, we have become acutely aware that most coaches don’t know how their actions and behaviors affect the growth of their teams. They don’t know what to do, how often to do it, or how to do it well. Because the vast majority of coaches in the business world don’t have the data and information they need, they have been underperforming for decades.
Analysis of this kind of coaching information not only allows a story to emerge but also solves a long-standing performance improvement mystery that, up to this point, has never been understood. That is, organizations would see different performance levels from teams, but the only data they could examine to explain this difference was on frontline performers. This information may answer the question in some cases, but without measurement of coach performance, there was a huge unknown variable.
We saw the impact of the coach when we analyzed data across sales departments of our client organizations. Forty-five percent of managers fell below necessary coaching quality standards to hit their sales number. When we considered the average sales goals of these coaches, this translated to $4.3 million left on the table due to inadequate coaching.
When it comes to creating high-growth coaches, these four steps, while independent, are inextricably linked. You cannot do just one of them and expect change. Simply put, if you want to build a high-growth culture, it takes consistent execution of the entire four-step process.
About the Authors
Bill Eckstrom, co-author of The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth
, is the founder of EcSell Institute, a research-based organization that works with leaders internationally to help them better understand, measure, and elevate coaching’s impact on performance. Bill was invited to the TEDx stage in 2017, and his talk “Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life” was the fastest-growing TEDx Talk in the history of the event when it was released. To learn more, visit: www.ecsellinstitute.com
Sarah Wirth, co-author of The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth
, is vice president of client services at EcSell Institute. She has twenty years of experience in employee assessment, leadership development, sales executive coaching, and customer service. She has advised executives from across the globe, consulting with such organizations as Mercedes-Benz, Estee Lauder, Ritz-Carlton, The Cheesecake Factory, and many more. To learn more, visit: www.ecsellinstitute.com
Culture Change – Slow Down to Go Fast
/in Corporate Cultures/by Wendy LoewenWorkplace culture isn’t something you can instantly fix, swap out, or quickly reboot. It’s not like a used car you can trade in when it no longer runs smoothly. Culture change requires culture work – and success necessitates effort and attention. Rather than being daunted by this task, we need to take a breath, slow down, and intentionally chart our course forward.
We recently worked with an organization who took the advice to slow down and take the time to invest in their long-term workplace culture to heart. Their decision was precipitated by a harassment complaint that revealed many layers of dysfunction – they could no longer ignore the impact their unhealthy culture was having.
Management was distant and unaware of the tension between employees, staff turnover was high, valued customers were leaving, and the human resources department admitted they were overwhelmed with the flood of complaints. The task of improving their workplace seemed enormous, but they decided to roll up their sleeves and get to work.
Senior management started by doing a cultural assessment and mapping out a plan. They began with a number of simple fixes to jumpstart the process. They revamped their respectful workplace policy, as well as held a training day for all staff to inform them of the current cultural assessment. Supervisors and management began joining employees in the common area during breaks.
To begin the long-term work of culture change, the organization initiated dialogue with staff and instituted weekly check-ins. They also revamped their performance management process to include a quarterly focus on employees’ goals, and provided all supervisors with training on conflict resolution and how to give effective feedback. These, along with a number of other changes, started to slowly shift their workplace culture in the right direction.
Now several months into the process, they are beginning to see the positive results! Staff are happier and more engaged, which has led to better productivity and an improvement in the quality of work being done. Their human resources department feels supported by management, and complaints have dropped as supervisors gain confidence in their ability to coach and support employees.
This organization realized that it would take time to replace the unhealthy culture with a healthy one, and that it couldn’t happen all at once. As a result of their patient and intentional work, they have seen a slow but marked improvement in their culture.
Culture is often so ingrained that people take it for granted. When we recognize that there are long-standing issues that we need to address, the work ahead can feel overwhelming, but culture won’t be improved with one-off initiatives like taco Tuesday or yearly surveys. Culture develops over time, and therefore takes time to change. Taking small steps to create a culture that will become the new standard may feel like slow work, but the rewards of a healthier culture are more than worth the wait.
About the Author