Monthly Archives: July 2012

Role of HR in Achieving Business Goals

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By Sherrie Scott for Demand Media

HR helps businesses achieve their goalsHuman resources professionals have many roles within an organization. They are responsible for formulating strategies that focus on recruiting and retaining top employees as well as overseeing projects that promote company-wide productivity. Most human resources departments control the overall operations of a business, making the department a key component of a company’s success in achieving its objectives.

Training and Development

Human resources specialists often are charged with creating training programs to strengthen the quality of work within an organization. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that “enhancing employee skills can increase individual and organizational performance and help to achieve business results”. The role of human resources in training and development includes assessing training needs, creating training manuals, facilitating instruction and ensuring training objectives have been met.

Employee Acquisition

An organization’s human resources department is responsible for many aspects of hiring and developing employees. According to the Society for Human Resources Management, employee acquisition and retention strategies are vital to the success of a company. Human resources managers implement these strategies to reduce turnover, improve employee skills and increase overall company production.

Project Management

Deliberate planning methods often are overlooked when conducting a company project. According to the CUPA Human Resources Journal, project management can be a critical tool for the HR organization in meeting an institution’s strategic goals.  Human resources involvement in project management helps companies remain organized by outlining project goals, identifying costs and benefits and assessing the risks of the project.

Compliance Management

Human resources managers handle the labor relations and dispute resolution operations of a company. Their role is to ensure that the organization is familiar with government regulations in regard to wage, labor and equal opportunity requirements. Strict compliance management can help a company avoid lawsuits and liabilities when disputes arise between employers and their employees.

Cost and Quality Control

Human resources specialists help businesses conserve costs when developing compensation packages, benefit materials and employee assistance programs. Further, technological advances increase the need for highly developed training programs that HR representatives are most qualified to implement. Human resources managers also are responsible for quality control, which is directly related to the successful accomplishment of company goals.

Sherrie Scott is a freelance writer in Las Vegas with articles appearing on various websites. She studied political science at Arizona State University and her education has inspired her to write with integrity and seek precision in all that she does.

7 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT A SALESPERSON’S MIND

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By Steve W. Martin, Heavy Hitter Sales Blog 

During the first four years of your life, 90 percent of your brain’s growth and development occurred. Your mind evolved as it interacted with the world around you and recorded strange and exciting new experiences. Now, it has been accumulating these experiences for decades. I’ve written extensively about how the successful salesperson’s mind thinks and processes language in my recent books Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology and Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics. Below, are seven fascinating facts about a salesperson’s mind.

1. Do You Never Forget a Face? Some people can easily recognize a face they have seen only once before. Obviously, this important social skill is beneficial for salespeople who must meet with many different customers. However, an MIT study found that this ability is an inherited specialized trait that is not linked to a person’s IQ in general. In other words, you either have facial recognition genes and the recognition ability or you don’t.

2. Does Rejection Really Hurt? Okay, you have just been told by the prospective customer that you lost that big deal you were counting on. Obviously, you are mentally and emotionally frustrated but you are also in physical pain according to a recent Columbia study. They studied MRI brain scans of people who experienced emotional rejection and they actually showed that the person is was in physical pain thus proving that losing really hurts!

3. Do You Like to Doodle? What do past Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan have in common? Well, they all liked to doodle during important phone calls and meetings. Research published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that doodling actually aids memory retention and doodlers have an average of 29% better event recall than non-doodlers.

4. Are You Optimistic? According to a study at University College London, 80% of people are optimists by nature. Their research suggests that optimistic people selectivity receive negative news. When hearing bad news, the brain scans of optimists showed very low activity in their frontal lobes as opposed to pessimists who had higher activity levels. So, if you are an optimist your brain is actually wired that way because you don’t “hear” bad news. In addition, optimists live longer according to one study of 100,000 participants.

5. Why Are You So Nice? A study published in the journal Psychological Science explained that “niceness” is tied to hormone receptor genes that emit oxytocin and vasopressin. These hormones in turn trigger the sensations of love and generosity within the mind. It turns out your innate nature to help people is really the result of a chemical reaction.

6. Why You Don’t Like to Read? Most salespeople don’t like to read. You see, your brain was built to talk. It was not designed to read. While speaking comes automatically and is a natural part of the brain’s development, reading is a skill that must be learned. It requires three different areas of your brain to work together in close coordination in order to read. All marketing departments should pay attention to this fact when creating sales training collateral!

7. Are You Humble? Contrary to conventional stereotypes that successful salespeople are pushy and egotistical, 91 percent of top salespeople have medium to high scores of modesty and humility according to a personality study of 1,000 top sales performers I have conducted. Furthermore, the results suggest that ostentatious salespeople who are full of bravado alienate far more customers than they win over.

Growing Your Sales Pipeline

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By Tom Callinan

In this article we will delve into ways to work with each sales rep to drive the company’s revenue growth.

Acccount Reviews:

I have not found any process that works better than account reviews to drive revenue growth. Account reviews should be conducted quarterly on each of a sales rep’s base and targeted accounts. At the minimum, the manager and rep participate in the account review, but upper management should participate in the top 50 reviews, 25 current customers and 25 targeted accounts, and should periodically participate in other reviews. Account reviews have a strategic focus but there are always tactical actions as outcomes.

The rep needs to prepare for the review by completing an account overview. The overview has basic account information — name, address, contacts — as well as information regarding the products and services you sell: what share of wallet do you have (if any); who are the competitors; what business does the competition have; what has changed in the account since the last review; where are your areas of opportunity; and your areas of vulnerability. You also need organizational charts that show the hierarchy from the front-line contact through to the C-level in the purchasing, IT, and finance departments with any relationships mapped to your company’s employees.

I recommend the manager spend at least an hour per week with each sales rep conducting account reviews. A review on a middle-market account takes about 10 minutes and a major account about 20 minutes. If you are dealing with Fortune 200 accounts those may take 30 to 40 minutes. So depending on the account bases the reps manage, they should prepare three to six accounts each week to be reviewed. To ensure you get through each rep’s assignment, schedule out the reviews in advance. If you leave it up to the reps to choose the accounts there is a good chance you will never see the accounts where they are struggling. Make certain each rep provides the manager with his “package” the day before the review so the manager is prepared for the meeting.

After the rep provides the account overview from a strategic and tactical perspective those involved in the account review have a robust discussion of how to help the rep achieve his short-term goals while working toward the common long-term goal of 100 percent share of wallet. It would be really easy being a sales manager if all reps were spot on in their account assessments. Unfortunately, that will only happen with a minority of reps so you will have to ask some probing questions after the rep’s overview so you can help identify areas they have missed. Additional areas of opportunity or concern will surface as you discuss certain tactics and strategies — and as you go through future iterations of the review — so do not try to find every nook and cranny in the overview stage.

I could give a full-day seminar on account reviews so it is impossible to cover everything you need to look for in this article, but I will try to cover some of the more critical areas.

You want to develop relationships higher and wider. Wider would be other departments; for example, you have a strong relationship with the manager of IT so now you need to develop relationships in finance and purchasing. Higher refers to working up to the C-level; how do you develop a relationship with the director of IT and eventually the CIO? Use the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” method to determine who in your company can leverage relationships with those folks you need to meet. Do not depend on the rep to initiate and manage all of the relationships — multiple levels of employees in your company should have relationships with multiple levels of employees in the customer or prospect company.

You want to thwart any competitive threats. Who is their copier provider? Who handles the printers in their data center? Do they have a facilities management provider? Do they have branch offices outside of their other vendors’ service area? Or do they have branches inside of the other vendors’ service area yet outside of your service area? How do you get that business while ensuring that those vendors do not displace you? Can you get the customer into a stronger contractual relationship or move some of their output from the copiers to the printers? Can you partner with somebody you trust for the outlying offices?

These areas define the robust discussion I mentioned earlier. As each manager facilitates more and more reviews they will become better and, by learning from each rep, they will be able to pass their knowledge onto the entire sales force. By having other managers in the company participating in the reviews they can help with the quality of plans and with the development of the manager and the sales employees. You will be working opportunities strategically rather than living month-to-month. The employee development and growth in the sales pipeline will result in more successful sales employees and reduce your employee turnover — compounding your growth. I have found no better process to drive revenue growth.

Pipeline: Some people refer to this as the sales funnel. Whatever you call it, it is a critical aspect of growing your business and of being able to see into future periods.

Continue Reading…

Lead for Growth

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By Kevin Steffey

Create a culture of growth with goals, engagement, fun, and improvementI have personally experienced the highs of the dotcom boom and the lows of the deep recession that has affected global business.  Years of flat sales, dramatic losses, and a never-ending stream of negative press can take a toll on the psyche of businesses and their leaders.  So, what separates the companies that are energized for growth versus those paralyzed by fear or their past successes?

  1. Lofty goals – whether the goals are changing the way something works in the world, achieving great financial success, or making a difference in the community, companies that have their employee base fired up are giving them something more to shoot for than just surviving. Creating that goal achievement mindset is critical – a feeling that you can conquer anything that comes at you.
  2. Everyone is engaged – in growth businesses there is such a buzz and sense of urgency that is infectious.  Everyone feels the need to pull their weight or they prevent the whole team for achieving those lofty goals.  It is important to get cross-functional teams involved in breaking through challenging roadblocks or thinking about ways to refine your strategies to reach your goals.
  3. Enjoying the Ride – while slaying dragons and achieving goals is intoxicating, even the best heroes need a refresh from time to time and companies that want to sustain the growth need to find ways to have fun along the way.  Team outings, hosting a company picnic, taking time out to give back to the community as a team.  Often these small investments pay big dividends and show the employees that it isn’t just about the work, but about the family of people you work with.
  4. Improving everyday - I always like the fly-wheel concept in Jim Collins book, Good to Great.  Companies that grow do so by creating momentum.  Momentum comes from many employees making improvements on a daily basis.   These improvements need to be encouraged, celebrated, and rewarded constantly.  You never know which small improvement might be the thing that pushes your business into a spiral of growth.

The common thread of these items is culture.  If your culture is in retrenchment mode, it is hard to generate growth. Energy flows where attention goes.  To lead for growth, focus your attention on creating a culture that celebrates it!

Kevin Steffey is President of Naviga Business Services, a national Sales and Marketing Recruitment firm.  Kevin and Naviga have a passion for sales and marketing positions due to their direct impact on the growth of their customers. Check out www.navigaservices.com to engage a partner in growing and developing your team.

Pumping up your Sales Pipeline

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by: Christian Maurer

I still have to meet the sales executive who is happy with her/his pipeline. When you ask them for the reason of their concern, the answer usually is: “it is not fat enough”. How do they know this? Obviously from experience. They know that only a fraction of the deals they and their people are currently working on will be won. The rule of thumb often heard in the High Tech Industry is that one out of three deals is usually won.

The obvious thing to do, is thus to make the pipeline fatter. To pump it up by finding new deals to enter into the pipeline (Prospecting and Lead Generation). As sales people function best when they see monetary rewards for their activities, you might beef up your campaign for pumping up the pipeline with some extra incentives and you set a goal on the number of leads you expect from each individual. This makes perfect sense following the principle that you can only expect what you inspect and what you pay for.

Chances are that sales executives taking such a decision have just shortened the tenure in their current position. Let us see how this can happen.

If you are in a business where the sales cycle (Lead to Close) is some 6 to 9 months, the action you have undertaken will bear fruit at best after the time it typically takes to get a deal through the pipeline. So this action will not be of any help if you are faced with the risk of a short fall already in the next quarter.

Worse yet, you might just have changed your rule of thumb. If you do not have a rigorous qualification process in place which determines when a lead can enter the pipeline, your lead to close ratio might actually worsen. There is a high likelihood that you get the number of leads you have asked for. Your risk is that they are of lower quality and thus a smaller percentage of them can be won. If that is not bad enough, it can come worth. Depending on your Forecasting process, these lower quality leads can also beef up your forecast. The changes to make this forecast are though slimmer than usually due to the lead quality problem discussed before.

There is yet another aspect that can lead you into trouble applying your rule of thumb. If the deals you and your people are working on are not evenly distributed in the pipeline, let us say a higher than usual proportion is only expected to close within six months, then your feared short fall for next quarter will be even more horrid than anticipated.

The reaction to correct a too thin pipeline as described above is human. I see it a symptom of what I call “Sales Executive’s Tunnel View”. I will tell more about this phenomenon in one of my next entries. A further entry will then be dedicated to the question whether the pipeline is a good metaphor to describe our list of deals we are working on.

For a quick measure to prevent you from “Sales Executives Tunnel View” may I suggest that you have a closer look into your pipeline and then apply the principle “try to get more from what you have”?

Christian Maurer, The Sales Executive Resource, is an independent sales effectiveness consultant, trainer and coach. He has a proven track record of helping to increase the productivity of large, global B2B sales organizations.

For the last 10 years Christian has consulted and coached hundreds of sales executives and managers on how to plan and execute their sales strategies by focusing on process management rather than trying to manage results. To assist the management in the execution of their strategies, he also has taught and coached their sales teams to increase their productivity by advising them on how to improve conversion rates and potential deal size with opportunity management, identify more deals and how to best approach potential buyers with account management, how to leverage marketing for their sales campaigns and how to orchestrate their activities with partners.

Assessing the Quality of your Sales Pipeline

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By Kevin Steffey

We are nearly 1 month into the second half of the year.  How are you feeling about your chances of meeting or exceeding your sales targets? 

How strong is your sales pipeline?If you are like many sales managers, you rely on the quality of the information provided by your sales professionals on your pipeline of business opportunities.  However, the pipeline as represented by your representatives is often filled with opportunities that are in varying levels of quality. A thorough review of you pipeline can either validate your confidence or give you an early warning of areas to address.

  1. Are there enough prospective opportunities entering the sales process or currently in the process?  Review the business that is currently in various stages of your sales cycle and apply your typical close rates, sales cycle and average deal sizes to see the value of business currently in your pipeline that has a chance of closing this year. Also, look at the volume of new business entering the pipeline on a weekly basis to assess how much you will add to your pipeline and close in the upcoming months.  Often the biggest hurdle to meeting your sales plan is having enough business to work and keeping a strong eye on the lead generation sources to ensure proper flow of new business.
  2. Are the right types of deals in the pipeline?  A common challenge for sales managers is keeping the team focused on working on the right opportunities – not just the easiest opportunities.  Review the pipeline to see if the mix of business is skewed to less profitable product lines or customer types?  Also, looking at the average deal size in the pipeline is critical to ensure that your sales assumptions are valid.  Test the values put in by your sales professionals.  Are they in line with typical deal sizes or are they inflated? Is there a trend you didn’t expect with the sales price or profit margin being pressured by competition or market dynamics?
  3. Is the business moving through the pipeline at the proper pace?  As you review the opportunities with your sales professionals, are the identified next steps with each opportunity occurring when they say they should?  Do the same opportunities keep showing up week in and week out at the same stage of the sales process? It is important to make sure that your percentage of opportunities moving from one stage to the next is not fundamentally changing from your assumptions.

As you compare the results in each of these areas across your sales professionals and against your norms, you will have a strong sense of how confident you should be in your plan.  As you identify your outliers, those reps that are struggling to add the right type and quantity of business and move it through the sales process, you can start to take corrective action and work with those team members to adjust as needed to hit targets.

Kevin Steffey is President of Naviga Business Services, a national Sales and Marketing Recruitment firm.  Kevin and Naviga have a passion for sales and marketing positions due to their direct impact on the growth of their customers. Check out www.navigaservices.com to engage a partner in growing and developing your team.

Praising for Performance

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By Kelley Robertson

Most managers have heard that providing positive reinforcement will improve team performance and motivation. During my career I’ve been surprised how few managers actually praise to their team members. Here are four steps that can help you provide effective praise to your team:

1. Praise the performance that deserves the praise.
All too often people praise someone on their team by saying something like, “Bob, you did a good job today.”
What exactly does this mean? How will the employee interpret it? What was the specific performance that deserved the recognition?
It is important that you are specific when providing positive reinforcement. For example, an employee has just dealt with a customer who was irate upon entering the store but left smiling and satisfied. You could say something like, “Excellent work, Mark. You did an excellent job calming down that customer.”

2. Communicate it clearly and sincerely.
A challenge that is faced by many managers is that they are uncomfortable proving praise to their team. The result? They aren’t clear when discussing positive performance with an individual. They ramble on too long or hide the praise in filler words such as “um” and “ah”. The employee then hears a message that is confusing and difficult to understand. This means that the positive reinforcement will not have as much impact as you intend. Learn to be direct when praising an individual or group of individuals. “Jill, I wanted to thank-you for coming in on your day off to cover for John.”
3. Acknowledge the commitment and effort.
When you praise an employee’s performance acknowledge their effort and commitment; that is, how hard they worked and how involved they were with it. For example, if an individual worked later because it was busy you could say, “Karen, thanks for sticking around tonight. I appreciate the extra effort you made to ensure that our customers were well taken care of.”
4. Ensure it is timely
When you praise an employee, ensure that it is timely. Praise the performance as soon as you are aware that it deserves recognition. If too much time elapses the individual may perceive the praise as an afterthought and it will have little, if any, positive impact. Managers frequently see an opportunity to provide positive reinforcement and, because they are busy at the moment, chose to tell the employee later. Unfortunately, what happens is that they get caught up in the day-to-day challenges and pressures of running a retail organization and they inadvertently forget to talk to the individual. The The consequence is an employee who performed well but didn’t receive recognition. This, in
turn, can cause their future performance to deteriorate or decline.
One of the challenges many managers face when it comes time to praise employees is that they are uncomfortable providing this recognition. If this describes you, try this approach:
On paper, write down what you want to say to your employee. It shouldn’t be any more than two or three lines. In other words, keep it brief. Once you have completed this practice verbally stating the praise. This will increase your comfort level and help you deliver the compliment more effectively. Then, provide the recognition to your team member.

Most management or leadership books will tell you to praise in public. My belief is that you should praise someone in an environment that will be most comfortable for the individual. Some people are very uncomfortable with public recognition and praise that is delivered in front of their peers can end up becoming a de-motivator. This means that you need to know your employees.

Recognition is something that every employee craves. If you are truly committed to improving your team’s performance invest a few minutes every day recognizing their efforts. When you notice great performance don’t wait to praise the employee, tell them immediately and follow these points:
1. Be specific
2. Be clear & concise
3. Acknowledge their effort
4. Make it timely

Copyright 2004 Kelley Robertson. All rights reserved

Kelley Robertson, President of the Robertson Training Group, works with businesses to help them increase their sales and motivate their employees. He is also the author of “Stop, Ask & Listen – Proven sales techniques to turn browsers into buyers.” Visit his website at http://www.RobertsonTrainingGroup.com and receive a FREE copy of “100 Ways to Increase Your Sales” by subscribing to his 59-Second Tip, a free weekly e-zine.

How 3 Companies took Content Marketing to the Next Level

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by Shane Snow for Mashable

It goes by many names: branded content, custom publishing, content marketing. Cheap and ubiquitous web technology has become fuel for a rising trend of businesses becoming publishers and brands becoming media companies. Through content creation, brands can engage directly with an audience rather than relying on intermediary media channels. If you publish and spread great content, customers will come to you.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, an organization that provides research and education on content marketing, “93% of marketing professionals create, or plan to create content marketing as part of their overall programs in the next year.” Money is being slurped away from print advertising (44% of marketers have decreased their print ad budgets over the last three years) and put in large part toward social media and custom publishing (70% have increased their social media.publishing budgets over the last 3 years), according to CMI.

Blogging, tweeting and posting not only generate brand awareness and buzz, they also build links, which are like gold to Google’s ranking algorithm. In short, content marketing is the new SEO.

How should your business or brand think about its content marketing strategy? Take some tips from the following companies.

1. Mint.com

mint image

When personal finance startup Mint launched in 2006, it was quickly thrown into competition with web startups like Wesabe, and established juggernauts like Quicken. Three years later, the company is a market leader in online personal finance and sold to Intuit for $170 million.

Mint owes much of its user adoption and brand success to its aggressively intelligent content strategy. Unlike the half-hearted, months-between-updates blogs that most businesses keep, Mint’s blog “MintLife” was a core part of the company’s operation.

Mint dedicated significant resources to its blog, including a full time editorial staff and a slew of freelance contributors. It invested time in social news sites like Reddit and Digg, and after months of seeing consistent, quality Mint content, readers in those communities began trusting Mint as high quality, reliable, and cool to share. Eventually, those users turned into Mint customers, even advocating Mint in their personal networks.

News and tips posts, link roundups, slideshows, videos, and infographics were all key components in Mint’s content strategy, and they were held to a strict editorial standard. By establishing itself as a smart resource that was easy and accessible to the financially curious, Mint was able to leverage its content credibility to convert readers into buyers of its actual product.

Mint is consistently lauded as a pioneer in successful blog content marketing. Big takeaways for attaining Mint-like success include the following:

  • Dedicate resources to content (whether paying outsourced/contributed writers or in-house editors).
  • Enforce high quality editorial standards on all content types (writing, illustration, video).
  • Share content smartly through social channels.
  • Remember consistency and patience in building up an audience.

2. Hubspot

hubspot image

Makers of the marketing software platform Hubspot know the value of good content for inbound marketing. Hubspot cofounder Dharmesh Shah anecdotally told me that his customers who blog regularly average about six times more inbound leads than those who don’t.

It makes sense that Hubspot itself does a lot of content marketing. They produce case studies, videos, podcasts, webinars, and ebooks for their audience, educating them about their industry. All of that education helps Hubspot customers use the platform more effectively, but it also scoops new users out of seemingly thin air with every piece of content it publishes to the blogosphere.

Hubspot has over 4,000 customers. Their primary customer acquisition method: inbound leads from content marketing.

Here’s what the rest of us can take away from Hubspot’s content marketing:

  • Produce content with the goal of being seen as a “thought leader” rather than simply for the sake of having large quantities of content.
  • Publish diverse types of content, and don’t confine yourself to a single effort.
  • Don’t just produce content about yourself; create content that’s helpful to your audience.

Disclosure: Hubspot is a Mashable sponsor.

3. American Express

amex image

When did credit card companies start turning into media companies? It’s been happening for years, but American Express has done a bang-up job of turning its business and money expertise into actionable content for entrepreneurs — an influential subset of Amex’s total user market — with OpenForum.com.

Open Forum offers tools for small businesses, many of which have tie-ins with Amex products, but the site is also dedicated to hosting insightful and engaging content about the many facets of running a business. Useful content is produced by publishers like Inc. Magazine (as well as Mashable), and hosted on OpenForum.com, while other articles are created by in-house Open Forum writers. It’s a hybrid advertising/guest blogging/in-house editorial operation, and it’s fostering a community around the topic of running a business. All of the conversations and content in the community live under the American Express flag.

Lessons from Open Forum’s content marketing include the following:

  • Get trusted contributors to publish guest content on your properties.
  • Develop a community of users around a topic (rather than around your brand), and let your brand be the host of the community.
  • Don’t neglect original content authored by you. (You want to be the host and an expert).

Final Thought

Omnipresent publishing tools and Internet culture have made branded content more than a possibility for web businesses; they’ve made it a necessity. Whereas five years ago your business needed to have a website in order to exist, soon your company’s survival may depend on your ability to be an effective publisher.

Aside from Mint, Hubspot, and American Express, many other companies have had great success in with content marketing. Whose branded content have you liked (or disliked)?

Shane Snow is a contributor for Mashable and cofounder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands and professional bloggers.

Benefits of Scenario Planning

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By Growth Resources, Inc. (Vistage)

“The goal of scenario planning is opening up the mind to hitherto unimaginable possibilities,” Malherbe says, “while at the same time prompting business leaders to question their own basic assumptions about how the world really works.”

Adds Poppei: “As a result of imagining different scenarios, the organization can more readily recognize warning signs as they unfold. By rehearsing different versions of the future, business leaders are better prepared to handle new situations as they arise. They’ve already examined options for actions that offer effective strategies for the future.”

Other benefits of scenario planning:

  • Inspires a sense of urgency about the future
  • Promotes proactive leadership initiatives
  • Offers a forum for CEOs and senior management to communicate their vision to different stakeholders

“By postulating different views of where your business is headed, you gain a sharper sense of the environment you’re working in now,” Malherbe notes. “It’s a great way to avoid being overly conservative in your thinking. You don’t want to limit your organization’s potential in today’s competitive marketplace.”

Through scenario planning, a business can take these pro-active steps:

Request the Entire Best Practice Module: Scenario Planning