Your Team Culture: Asset or Liability?

“Our people are our most valuable asset”. We’ve heard this from companies many times, and we know it’s true. That’s why it’s surprising that many companies fail to actively harness and develop their team’s culture and performance.

What is your company’s culture?

As a business owner, you understand the link between team culture and performance. Winning companies have a winning culture, pure and simple. An actively managed team culture propels the company forward, builds talent, builds your brand, and opens up strategic opportunities.

The key phrase is “actively managed”. Your team has a culture. The question: is it the culture you want? Answer these Yes/No questions to find out:

1. We are unable to find people with “the right stuff”.

2. Our strategic options are limited.

3.  We have a “bench strength” problem. Our next generation of leaders is not up to the task (or we don’t have enough of them).

If your answer to any of these questions is a “Yes”, take some time to think about the company culture you want, and what actions your firm is taking to build that culture. You may want to conduct the following exercise at your next staff meeting: have each member of your team write down their description of the company’s culture  on their own. Compare notes amongst the group and discuss how it’s driving the firm’s success, and what the company is doing to building a winning culture.

Dream bigger, reach higher, and achieve more!

-Coach Alay

5 Tips on Choosing Effective Sales Training

Done right, sales training can drive growth of over 30% in just 6-12 months. Yet time and time again, the benefits are temporary, the enthusiasm is transient, and in three months time it’s back to business as usual.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Here are five critical elements that winning sales training programs share:

1. Training is conducted in person, with the sales team together. Here is the secret sales trainers don’t want you to know: the true magic of sales training is when the sales team learns from each other. This peer-to-peer best practice discussion is more effective, applicable, and likely to last.

2. Agenda is short on lecture and high on participation. Sitting in a classroom is tough enough on your sales team. To keep them engaged, make sure the curriculum is 75% discussion and 25% lecture.

3. Program addresses both the art and science of selling. Sales training tends to focus on either the art of selling or product-specific technical training. Which is better? As you can imagine, you need both.

4. Program is customized to the company, and to the individual salesperson. Effective sales training is specific to unique challenges of the company and the individual participants. A strong program is customized to each participant with assessments. In addition, the group discussions provide relevance that’s specific to your company.

5. Training drives accountability and effort over time. Effective training programs change the behavior of the participants. Changing behavior requires sustained effort over a period of time. Sustained effort requires accountability. That’s why each of my sales trainings are not complete until each participant has created their own 13 week action plan. And then we ensure that a follow up mechanism exists. And yes, those who complete their action plans receive an award.

Are you ready to grow your business? If so, consider investing in your sales team. Choose the right program and your results will be immediate, leveraged, and sustained.

May you dream bigger, reach higher, and achieve more.
Alay Yajnik (@AlayYajnik)
Alay’s passion is working with business owners to grow their businesses and reclaim their time. Visit Alay’s website for more business ideas: www.alayyajnik.com.

Find Your Inner Start Up

The Lean Start Up by Eric Reis ignited a revolution in product launch thinking. What started as a software-specific model for rapid iteration based on fast failure and live experimentation has spread beyond software to virtually every technology, no matter how risk averse. In medical devices, for example, Lean Start Up concepts are being applied to de-risk the Go To Market process for these products. Although the core technology is validated through traditional large scale clinical trials, support processes such as Supply Chain, Service, and Sales Operations are using Lean Start Up principles to minimize wasted time and capital.

The Lean Start Up principles of deploying a minimum viable product for learning, creating experiments to validate assumptions, and iterating rapidly are useful in a variety of situations including intra-company efforts at large companies as well as software start ups.

The Build-Measure-Learn Model

Take some time this week to think about how you can apply Lean Start Up principles to your business. If you’d like more information, visit www.theleanstartup.com or drop me a line.

May you dream bigger, reach higher, and achieve more.

Alay Yajnik (@AlayYajnik)

Alay Yajnik’s passion is working with business owners to grow their businesses and reclaim their time. Visit Alay’s website for more business ideas: http://www.alayyajnik.com.