Archive for July, 2008

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How To Plan An Employee Workshop

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Employee workshops can be a very useful way of training staff. However, they can also be seen as a waste of time by the same staff that they are meant to help. This is usually down to poor planning and a misunderstanding by staff of what the workshop is meant to provide. It is essential that the people attending the workshop understand how the workshop can help them, and that they people fully involved int he workshop. there is nothing worse than a workshop where a lot of hard work has been put in by the organisers, only for those attending to be very unenthusiastic and lethargic towards the whole process.

There are several ways that you can get attendees of employee workshops to feel more involved. These include:

  • Using actors to help demonstrate parts of the workshop
  • Use relevant case studies and issues that the attendees deal with on a regular basis.
  • Make sure that questions are posed to the attendees throughout the workshop, making sure that they are relevant and that answers are expanded upon by other people in the workshop.

Once you have the interest of the people in the workshop, you must make sure that you do not lose that interest. How you do this is up to you, but it is essential that you have the entire workshop planned - if you start to falter at any point, people will lose interest very quickly. Keep that attention!

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Management Training - Dealing With Unexpected Reactions

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Something that most managers fear is an unexpected reaction. When these unexpected reactions can be anything from someone crying in an interview to becoming angry during an appraisal, the question has to be asked - how can these sort of scenarios be trained for and if possible avoided?

A series of realistic role plays (ideally with actors, but without is fine too) will help people managers to learn how to deal with these scenarios. Every company has its horror stories of interviews and appraisals that went bad, and it is important to draw on these experiences and case studies to tailor the training as much as possible.

When providing managers with training for these sorts of incidents, it is important that several areas are covered and that the training is targeted towards these areas:

  • Understanding why people can become difficult and how it affects those around them.
  • How to negotiate and mediate.
  • Learning how to become a skilled communicator.
  • See how manager behaviour can influence and affect staff.
  • Develop measures to deal with difficult situations, conflict, and difficult people.
  • How to handle disciplinary action with confidence.

While this may seem like this is a lot to cover, large sections of it can be covered using just a single role play.

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Improving your presentation skills and making an impact

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

An area that is often over looked in sales is that of giving presentations. A well crafted and delivered presentation can close a sale in five minutes. A badly built and poorly delivered presentation can ruin any rapport you have built with the potential client and may ruin you chances of ever getting the sale.

So how can you make sure that you aren’t going to deliver a bad report? There are three main areas you should concentrate on - Intellectual Skills, Physical Skills and Interactive Skills.

Intellectual Skills

This includes the planning of the presentation, what is going to be in the presentation, and how you are going to deliver the information to your audience. Not all presentations have to just be a slide show and talking, there are other options that may be relevant in some cases.

Physical skills

This is how you give the actual presentation. You need to make sure you make eye contact with your audience, that you pause where required and don’t just rush though the presentation as quickly as possible. You need to take command of the meeting and make sure that the entire audience is listening to you everyword. You need to make sure that the client is hoping that you continue to speak rather than hoping that you will be done soon.

Interactive Skills

This is how you and the audience interact. You need to make sure that you are engaging the client. That you are creating a dialogue where they can ask you questions and you can answer them without breaking the flow of the presentation. Are you going to involve the client in the presentation?

The most important thing though, is to make sure that you know what you are talking about. Even the best presenter will fail and leave a bad impression if they are unsure of what they are talking about.

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Keeping your customer service training relevant

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

One of the most important areas of any company that has clients is the customer service department. Once a sale is made, most of the clients contact with the company from that moment on will be through the customer service department. This means that it is essential that the customer service team are as of a higher standard as possible.

An area where some companies fall down is that the customer service training is not updated as often as it should be. Whenever products or services that the company offer change, or there is a major change in the way the company operates, it is essential that the customer service department are trained as soon as possible to deal with these changes, and to help explain to clients about the changes/new products and services in a competent and reassuring way.

The most important thing is to plan in advance. Obviously there are some changes that you cannot see until they occur, but everything else you must try to plan for as well as possible. You need to make sure you are constantly updating the client service training to cover all new services and products, as well as making sure that training sessions are arranged to pass on the updated training to all relevant staff.

Remember, keeping you client service department updated and well trained will result in happier clients, which will result in renewals, up sells and referrals, all things which are important to any company.

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How to teach telesales

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

One of the most common forms of sales is telesales. This, by its very nature, is a very different beast to face to face selling. This means that telesales staff will require very different training than if it was a sales role where they would be meeting and dealing with potential clients face to face.

Areas that should be concentrated on when you are carrying out telesales training include:

  1. How to build rapport without any face to face interaction
  2. How to deal with Gate Keepers and talk to the decision makers
  3. Helping potential clients overcome resistance to telesales
  4. Why preparation and research before calls will lead to sales

This is a list that could go on and on. It is important to remember that while telesales and face to face sales do have somethings in common, the things that are different are the ones that are the most important and need to be concentrated on. For example, with telesales, you have to pay more attention to peoples tone of voice and pauses in conversation, as there is no body language to read. This alone can cause major issues if people are used to just reading body language to judge how people are reacting and feeling.

Yet again, as with most other areas of training, using roleplays is one of the most effective ways to improve telesales skills. You do not want to people to be learning the fundamentals while talking to potential clients on the phone. You want sales staff who know in their head how the scenario should play out, and what are the likely deviations and how they can cope with these, and this is what using roleplay helps with the most. It allows people to see how other people would deal with situations, but also allows them to understand how people react to what they are saying, and how they can improve upon this.

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Sales Training - Where to start?

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Sales training is one of those things that can vary a lot depending on who you are providing the training to. For example, if you already have salespeople of a high standard, then obviously the training that you offer would be a lot more advanced than that of of those who are just starting out in sales. There are many things that may seem obvious to an experienced salesperson, which would never occur to a trainee, and you do not want them learning these things during contact with potential clients, but rather that they should be learned during training, where mistakes do not matter.

It is important that all new sales staff have a decent and well planned sales training course before they are told to sell, this is to make sure that they do not make any mistakes as they start their sales career. It is always a good idea to make sure that the basics are understood - for example:

  • How to sell and not just tell.
  • Why do customer buy?
  • How to gain appointments.
  • How to close a sale.

While these are all things that any experienced salesperson would take for granted, making sure that all new staff understand the answers to these questions will result in better sales staff who are able to make sales without wasting leads.

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How to Plan Effective Meetings

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Planning and managing meetings is a skill that does not come naturally to many managers. However, a meeting that is badly planned and run can result in a de-motivating, dull and unproductive waste of time, as opposed to the breath of fresh air that some meetings can be when run effectively.

Some of the things to look at if you want to achieve an effective meeting include:

  1. Know what you want to talk about in the meeting. Make a list of everything you want to cover, then go through that list, and remove all topics that aren’t essential, or can be dealt with in other ways.
  2. Create an agenda for the meeting to keep things moving. Give everything rough timings. It is okay if things go over, but you need to try and keep on track as much as possible.
  3. Make sure that the meeting is required - don’t have meetings for the sake of having meetings. Look at the agenda - is the meeting really required, or can it the the issues be dealt with in other ways?
  4. Make sure all the people that need to know the information discussed ion the meeting are going to attend the meeting. There is little point in having a meeting if you then have to repeat the meeting to people who should have been there but were not. This can also result in miscommunication and loss of detail.
  5. If you find yourself having meetings where things that aren’t on the agenda get discussed a lot more than things that are on the agenda, then you need to look at the underlying cause of this. Is there a reason why the things that are causing debate aren’t down as discussion topics on the agenda? Did you simply not realise how important the issue was? As the leader of the meeting, it is important that you spot such issues and make sure that they are dealt with.

These are a few things to help with your meetings. Remember, the best managers have meetings that last just long enough to achieve every thing required, occur just often enough that everything is dealt with in a timely fashions, and accomplish more than is required.

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Three Things To Remember When Dealing with Angry People

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

At some point in their life, most people will have to deal with angry people. Whether this at your place of work, or in your everyday life, it will always be an unpleasant experience. However, wherever the anger is encountered, it is important to remember a few simple rules that will help you to deal the angry person and hopefully solve the cause of their anger.

  1. Do not lose your own temper and get angry. This will not fix the underlying cause of the other persons anger, and will instead just create more issues.
  2. Remember that there is a reason why the other person is angry. Try and find out what this reason is, and solve that problem.
  3. Take the anger seriously. Even if you are in a position to ignore it, don’t. It is important that people who are angry feel that they are being taken seriously.

While it is easy to read these rules and think that they are obvious, it is a different matter altogether when you have to try and put them into practice. That is where role playing possible scenarios in which you might encounter angry people will help enormously when it comes to dealing with them in the real world. Practising how you will react when confronted by a person who is angry will help you to react in the correct way when it happens for real. As everyone says - practice makes perfect!

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Employee Workshops - how to get people involved

Friday, July 18th, 2008

One of the problems faced when running an employee workshop is getting the employees involved in role plays and other such interactive techniques. There always seems to be some sort of stigma attached to these sort of exercises - no matter how the employee workshop is run, as soon as you mention role play, people start to become anxious and worried about what might happen. This is not due to any lack of perceived value in the role play (indeed, most people will admit that role play helps them), but rather through the fear of a possibility of humiliation.

So how can this fear be overcome? The answer is quite a simple one really - use actors in place of employees. This allows employees to see what is happening and understand what is required, and allow them to become enthusiastic and want to become involved without any perceived pressure. It allows people’s natural enthusiasm to get out, without making them feel conspicuous or embarrassed. Quite often, you will find that employees become a lot more involved if there are actors to start the role plays off, than if there were just other people that they work with involved.

Using actors may seem like an elaborate solution to getting people more involved in employee workshops, but it works better than any other solution available, and must be considered when planning workshops involving roleplays.

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