Posts

The Future Is Now

/in , , , /by

The future is now

The Future is Now

In his guest blog this week, Ryszard Chciuk reflects upon his years with his service management team and considers that the future is now.

Once upon a time, I and my new service management team decided to create the best after sales organization in our country. I am not going to tell you how to build something from scratch. It is about the most important thing: how to explain to all members of a team what we are going to achieve together within the next several years. Some authors of books for managers call it vision. I have a problem with this word because in my native language we sometimes have visions, usually after too many drinks. Also, I don’t recommend using that word while speaking to the front-line people. Instead of vision, I talked to them about our common long-term goals. Why?  Terms like vision, mission, values and strategy are irritating to many managers and plenty of employees. They become anxious about the future of their companies – and mostly they are right – when the highest management starts to talk about new market strategy based on new values, new vision and new mission. One can ask oneself: in the end, what’s it really all about? Is it about closing our decent business? Contrary to myself, in the story for English speaking readers I will use the word vision. Maybe you were luckier in your encounters with the prophets without true vision.

At that time, our parent company vision was To be the Model of Excellence and Care. Sounds nice, but how to present it to newly employed field technicians, mechanics, service supervisors, as well as parts and administration personnel? Unfortunately, the vision of our corporation was not translated into more specific version, understandable for all employees of the dealership.

My service team decided to work out the vision just for ourselves. Why?

I knew my department would grow very fast. It would be no time for an individual coaching. Written procedures did not exist. Creating a company culture was in progress. Our plan to build the best after sales organization could not be executed if we employed people having bad habits. As the result of that assumption, most of my new colleagues were very well educated, but totally inexperienced. And even worse, they were to work in the field, mostly out of a supervisor’s eye. They were allowed to make mistakes, if they did it with good intentions. How were they to discern what was right and what was wrong? They needed to know the main, long term goals of the after sales department, our vision of our future.

N.B. Few years after we implemented the idea of vision, I found a confirmation that it was a proper approach. In his Strategy Navigation-A Systems Approach to Business Strategy, H. William Dettmer mentioned: … the military has learned an important lesson that most businesses haven’t: how to shorten response time to unexpected developments and build flexibility into the system. They do this by avoiding detailed policy and guidance from the highest levels – micromanagement – concentrating instead on establishing the overall objectives and rules of engagement alone.

How did we achieve it?

To propose and discuss long terms goals for a team, its members would have to find the answers to the following questions:

  • Which long term goals of our dealership and corporation am I able to support as a member of the after sales department?
  • What is my greatest professional dream?
  • What would make me proud in 3-5 years from now?
  • What are the main competencies of our team?
  • What differences do we have and what will make our team different from the competitors in the future?

First draft of our vision was agreed by the core members of the service management team. Then it was discussed in details, during Q&A sessions with all of our people. We did it because people are more eager to follow the agreed rules if they had a chance to define them.

Finally, our after-sales department vision was as follows:

  • most of our customers recognize us as the best construction equipment service in the country
  • we generate profit which covers cost of employees’ personal development and provides financial liquidity of our dealership, when the demand for new machines is reduced significantly
  • the best employees and the best suppliers want to work for us or collaborate with our team
  • we are always prepared for unexpected changes and we implement them in the proper time.

Please notice: those four sentences are written in the present tense, because the future is just now. Every day, each worker can assess approximately how far we are from our goals. Every month or every quarter, employees get more accurate data about the performance of their small teams in that matter. It happens if you have worked out balanced scorecards for teams and single employees.

Next time, I will tell you, what it was for.

What is your PEOPLE strategy? When should it begin?

/in , , , /by

What is your PEOPLE Strategy? When should it begin?

What is your PEOPLE strategy? When should it begin?

In this week’s guest blog, Don Shilling addresses your business and asks the question “what is your people strategy?” Not only that, when should it begin?

What is the “definition of a expert”? . . . . . I once heard that an expert was a factory rep at least 50 miles from home who was at your business to give you advice!

As I put words down on this page, I am in admitting I am not an expert. I just like to share thoughts and if you think they make sense then you can figure out how to implement them.

We have all gone through the exercise of developing a business strategy. Most sound a lot alike . . . .  and after we have meetings and cover the walls with Post-It notes or flip chart pages our “Strategy” may be to Increase sales by 5%, or perhaps develop a new store location in new and active part of our territory, maybe we will upgrade 30% of our vehicle fleet, or our focus might be looking for that new idea like taking on a new product line. Your team I am sure puts a lot of effort into this exercise and at the end of the day it all makes sense and gives you a map for the future.

Sometimes our strategy includes elements related to people and sometimes perhaps it is brushed off! The interesting thing is each strategy, like it or not, has to include people. The people who we either need to be hired or the people we must challenge to change to fill the new roles we need to execute this new bold strategy.

Today in our current environment it might take 60 to 180 days to fill a skilled position if you can find that person at all. As I mentioned in a blog before, we grow our own skilled technical people and that takes much longer than just a couple of months. Whether you promote from within or just need to re-train existing people it takes just as long. We must be prepared to admit this will probably be our weakest link in our strategy and address it far in advance of the annual Strategy Session if we want any of our strategies to succeed.

In an earlier phase of my career I was CEO of my organization back when I spearheading strategy development. I soon realized that was not just HR’s job to fill positions, it was mine! Not to “micro-manage” HR or replace them but to assist HR in getting involved with “People Attraction”.

Now People Attraction can take on many forms. We did the same everyone does, we checked our wage packages, our benefit packages, we talked about culture and we did employee rewards programs, reviewed our facilities to make sure they were safe and comfortable for our workforce.  We all have to do that!

However, I felt compelled to go beyond that. I started by getting involved in local Technical Colleges where we might find our next employee.  We tried serving on Advisory Boards and helping connect with these Institutions on a more intimate basis. We got involved in the local Chamber of Commerce committees that dealt with employment practices and trends. Made an effort to get involved with State Technical Education Agencies to see what was going on and to give advice and donations of resources where it made sense to promote our industry.

Last but not least I got involved with our local Workforce Development Council. In our State it is Governor appointed and encompasses a cross section of people and agencies in the State where we get to together and work to solve workforce issues. In most cases we have developed recommendations to our State legislature in development programs to attract, educate or retain our workforce. I have testified numerous times to Legislative Committees to spell out to them the needs of business and industry in our region and promote the things that will improve our workforce efforts. For example, last session we got a law passed to make tuition reimbursement to an employee not subject to income tax and we help enact a program to provide State matching dollars with private dollars for “High Demand Jobs” tuition education reimbursement.

This was kind of a “hidden” part of our strategy. Has it worked you might ask? I think so. As frustrating as it can be to deal with a cross section of leaders from industry, labor, education and government it is worth the effort.

Now when we sit down and set a strategy where perhaps we think we need a half dozen additional skilled employees to increase our market penetration it becomes an attainable goal and not a goal where are the end of the year, we have excuses for its failure. To sum up – as an Executive in your organization you must get involved and become part of the Strategy before there is a Strategy! Good luck.

Challenges to Leaders Are All Around Us

/in , /by

Challenges to Leaders are all around us.

We are living in an era of great change: socially, politically, environmentally, technologically and in nearly every aspect of our lives. This presents wonderful opportunities for us while at the same time it represents threats. As a nation while we are excitedly and anxiously awaiting events and advancements we have had to deal with the pandemic. This has given us time to reflect on how we live our lives, how we do things and what is important. Most of us are not creating these events or advancements – there are other people and businesses doing that for all of us.

But we have to navigate our way through these changes. Change is not something that mankind has embraced easily over time. Change, although positive in the long run, can be daunting for most of us in the short term. When we put into perspective the world in which we live and compare the changes we are experiencing to previous generations we sometimes think we are moving ever faster in the pace of change.

However, the rate of change that we are experiencing is an exponential curve that really started to have an impact in the mid 1800’s. Let me share a short story here. The electric engine arrived in the mid-1800s and industry immediately starting replacing steam engines with the new electric engines. This was a very dramatic change.

Yet most Industries did the same thing. All that we did was change the engine from steam power to electrical power. We didn’t change much in the way of the methods or procedures at all, that was left for another generation. You see, these two events, changing the power source AND changing processes and methods would have been too much to absorb in society at one time. It took a new generation before new processes and methods were changed and then productivity change accelerated.

It seems like resistance to change can be so powerful, that it can hold back productivity gains. This begins to make sense when we realize that the changes that are made that increase productivity, to some degree increase risk for the work force. So, leadership becomes even more critical when we are faced with times of great change.

The time is now.

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Strategic Planning for Key Accounts

/in , , , /by

Strategic Planning for Key Accounts

Strategic Planning for Key Accounts

Virtual Selling Tips related to Vital Selling Regimens by Don Buttrey, President of Sales Professional Training, Inc. In this week’s guest blog, Don shares with us some strategic planning for taking care of key accounts.

Dealing with market potential becomes a challenge in the virtual world as well. Using data and information is critical. Your business systems can help you here. Take advantage of these condition and circumstances to become much smarter on how you manage you time and business.

Strategic Planning for Key Accounts 

  1. Focus primarily on accounts that are less impacted by the pandemic to assure quicker results in these accounts that already have a long selling cycle.
  1. However, it may be wise to pick at least one or two strategic accounts where business may be stalled short-term –but that have significant long-term potential. Now is an ideal time to do the legwork and create a path for future business. Now is a chance to build trust and solidify relationships. (whereas before, they had little or no time to spend with you.) Giving them time and offering creative ways to prepare for future growth now, proves that you are not just a partner in the good times. Show them that you are focused on their business in good and bad times – instead of just taking orders selfishly and forgetting about them! In difficult economies, focus on expanding influence and growing your market share. When it picks up again – you are well positioned!
For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Emotional Intelligence – Accelerating Team Performance

/in , , /by

Emotional Intelligence – Accelerating Team Performance

Emotional Intelligence - Accelerating Team Performance

This week’s guest blog from Sonya Law covers the link between emotional intelligence, and a leader’s skill at accelerating team performance.

Recently I attended an event featuring Daniel Goleman leading authority in Emotional Intelligence, who covered Team Performance.

What is a LEADERS ROLE in setting goals in 2021?

  1. Give people clear goals.
  2. Free to get there in their own way (Empowerment).
  3. Immediate feedback – so they can self-correct mid-course.
  4. Set stretch goals for those that are motivated by Challenge.

There are Six Types of Leadership Styles: Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, Commanding.

People and teams want to be inspired and this comes from Leadership.  The Visionary leaders have a strong sense of their own purpose and can articulate shared goals and inspire team spirit.  This will be particularly important in attracting Millennials – whom will want to be inspired and work for companies and buy products that ‘make a difference’ and contribute to the greater good of society and the environment will be important in branding and marketing in the future.

An Affiliative leader knows the importance of building social capital and will take time to listen to their people and will implement any change seamlessly; a Coaching style leader will engage regularly in banter with their team and through it builds loyalty and staff retention in organisations. And a Democratic leadership style encourages collaboration which builds commitment which has productivity and innovation benefits.

It is the responsibility of the CEO, Human Resources and Senior Executive Team to use your Culture Survey results and feedback from your people to tailor your recruitment and selection strategy to ensure the leaders you hire close the gap on where the deficit is in your forecasting in 2021.

The last two are defunct from Daniel Goleman’s perspective and are ineffective in inspiring and accelerating Team Performance.  Pacesetting leadership style is where the leader is an excellent individual contributor and has a high work output but fails to inspire others.  The command and control while effective in the military may not be enough to inspire the next generation of millennials.  As baby boomers exit the workforce this will also pave the way for organisations to place emphasis on inclusivity and diversity in workplace culture.

Key in business leaders in 2021 will be Emotional Intelligence, self-awareness – is the foundation the basis for Emotional Intelligence (EQ).  It’s a cognitive control that moderates our behavior and interactions with people and enables us to connect, engage and influence people and business outcomes which are essential to people leadership. It also improves executive decision making but it is not everything there is also gut feeling which is the wisdom of your experience.  When reaching any executive decision, you probably have relied on one if not all of these things, your gut instinct, data (logical brain) and engaged your emotional intelligence.

So how do you build a Culture of Emotional Intelligence?

  1. Hire people who have emotional intelligence and Korn Ferry has some good assessment tools and 360-degree feedback.
  2. Review your people’s emotional intelligence at performance reviews.
  3. Build it into your culture through learning and development.
  4. Coach leaders in Emotional Intelligence.

It poses the question:

  1. Should we hire for technical skills (IQ) or soft skills (EQ) which is more important particularly when we are hiring for technical roles and future leaders?

The answer is both, you all have come across an engineer who is brilliant but unfortunately you can’t put them in front of a customer or client because they lack the people or communication skills (EQ).

So, what’s it worth to you?

Your reputation with your customer and future leadership talent pipeline.

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

 

 

Coverage and Account Priority

/in , , , /by

Coverage and Account Priority

Coverage and Account Priority

Virtual Selling Tips related to Vital Selling Regimens  by Don Buttrey, President of Sales Professional Training, Inc. In this week’s guest blog from Don Buttrey, we explore the importance of coverage and account priority.

Call reporting can keep us on track but staying on top of the action is much harder from the home office. It is all too easy to get interrupted at home, or to lose the prioritizing system when we work in our traditional professional spaces.

Coverage and Account Priority

  1. In this slower market, set an aggressive deadline to call through all the current accounts under your responsibility. Stay in ‘front of mind’ even if their business is slow or on hold.
  2. Periodically you should re-prioritize your accounts to adjust to market changes and other dynamics. During this pandemic, re-prioritize your accounts to focus on accounts that are less impacted and offer immediate sales potential. Some customers or segments are actually doing better in this current downturn. Focus on the right accounts and markets NOW. (This also applies to your selection of Strategic Accounts – see next)
For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Metrics For Your Website

/in , , /by

Metrics For Your Website

Metrics For Your Website

Today’s guest blog is from Mets Kramer, sharing knowledge about the metrics you need for your website, and understanding your digital traffic to better engage your audience.

You use metrics for every other part of your business, so it’s time to learn more about them for your digital marketing, specifically your website.  This is a continuation of my previous blog on Engagement Digital Marketing.

Growing up and working in the equipment business, we are all familiar with metrics.  My first experience with them was the measurement of invoice days, or rather days between last labour and invoice date.  As service supervisor, I learned it was a good indication of one aspect of our operational efficiency.  Later, I would learn invoice days was one of several metrics which would provide a complete picture of the efficiency of the operation.  For example, I found receivables days was a complement to invoice days, and if we invoiced too fast, with poor quality, receivables lingered.

Your digital marketing work is no different from your other business operations.  Metrics, or measurements, help you understand what is happening with you digital marketing efforts.  What each of us need to do, is understand what the metrics mean, how they relate, and how you can affect them.  It is also important to pick a set of metrics that drive to something valuable for your business, not just target numbers that seem good.

In this blog I would like to look at a few common metrics for your dealership website.  They are Visitors, Bounce Rate, Average time per page/session and Conversions.

Visitors are great!  Of course, we want traffic to our websites, if no one visits, does it really exist? But what does it mean?  Think of Visitor traffic as the top of your funnel (or crusher if you prefer).  It tells us how many people have visited the website and had a look at the pages they landed on.  Visitors can enter the site through the main page, or directly to specific pages using links on other sites.  Either way, it is the starting measurement.  Having high traffic levels sounds great, and is certainly better than very low, but the other metrics will tell us more about what happened when those visitors viewed the site.

Bounce rate: this is a very common metric used by internet people, partially because it sounds fun.  Bounce rate measures the number of people who landed on your site and then left without looking at any other pages.  This means bounce rate, on its own, is not a great measure of success, or of a good website.  A very high bounce rate is generally an indication that people have low engagement with your site, and so warrants investigation.  However, if you are bringing people directly to your site, targeting specific pages, a high bounce rate needs to be viewed alongside a metric such as Average time on page to understand what it means.   For now, consider bounce rate a measure of “are people clicking to other pages on my site before they leave”

So that’s the first two, we have people coming to the site, and we know if they are clicking around or not.

The next measure is average time per page or per session. How long are people spending on each page, and how long is each session.  For Bounce rate, a high rate is often considered bad, but if you are driving traffic directly to a page, like this blog, and the visitors are spending enough time on the page to read it, average time on page can be a measure of success, even if they bounce after reading.   Remember our Digital Marketing strategy is a strategy of engagement, so more time spent on your site means higher engagement, even if they only visit one page. For other visitors, look at how long they spend on the site or pages, it should match the content on the page to determine what a good metric target is.

Finally, Conversion Rate.  In the end, for equipment dealers, your websites should be more than just information sites.  Our sites should be designed for action.  This is often called a “call to action” when reading about website performance.  Just like we talk about a complete set of metrics for other business areas, Conversion Rate is important final goal for measuring website engagement.  Conversion Rate can be determined using a contact form, a button to call your dealership or generating a lead in your CRM.  Typically, an average conversion rate is 2%, but as with all these metrics, it depends on numerous other factors of your site.  It is important to see your engagement digital marketing efforts in relation to conversion rate, a tangible result.

Collecting these measurements can be done with numerous tools.   The most obvious is Google Analytics, but there are WordPress plugins that do the same, and other content systems have their own dashboards as well.  The important thing is to get them set up and use them.

Obviously, this topic is extensive, and I can not provide a comprehensive explanation in one blog.  I hope each of you understands a little more about what website metrics mean, how they relate and how they can guide your digital marketing efforts.  If your dealership has a website, and you are investing money in your digital marketing, it is important to understand the value you are getting for your investment.

All these metrics apply to all forms of traffic, including referrals, organic and paid.  In my next blog I will look at these topics from the perspective of paid traffic.

If you would like to learn more, or want to get some help with these topics, please contact me and I would be happy to explain or put your in touch with some trusted people that can help you execute.

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Prospecting and Account Penetration

/in , , , , , /by

Prospecting and Account Penetration

Prospecting and Account Penetration

Prospecting and Account Penetration: Virtual Selling Tips related to Vital Selling Regimens. By Don Buttrey, President of Sales Professional Training, Inc. For today’s guest blog, Don shares with us the unique challenges of prospecting and account penetration in the virtual world. In the world of “before,” it was a given that we could meet with our customers. This new normal challenges us to innovate our processes.

Not being able to drive around and see what is going on in the field is a problem today. We have to be creative with how we do our prospecting. Using the phone is much more effective in numbers it is the quality not the quantity that gives us some trouble.

Prospecting and Account Penetration

  •  Now is the opportune time to find and develop new accounts and new relationships within existing accounts!
  • Slower markets put pressure on ‘price’. But you can overcome that with good fundamental selling. One of your best negotiation strategies is to increase your prospecting. Having more deals in process (better participation/market awareness) gives you more power. The more deals you have in the pipeline – the better!
  • Have thick skin. Do not take rejection personally. Be carefully persistent. If they are a potential customer, they will appreciate your proactive effort!
For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

Complacency

/in , , , , /by

Complacency

Complacency

Tonight’s guest blog on Complacency is from Ross Atkinson. Ross spent his entire 33+ year career in the Heavy Equipment software marketplace with PFW/ADP/CDK. He was the architect and software designer for most of the applications in the rewrite of the core Dealer Management System called IntelliDealer. Having been in many roles with the Company from installation to ownership, he has first-hand knowledge of the system requirements of dealerships and the people who use it. His specialty is the ability to design and create solutions to ensure the best user software experience possible.

Complacency

Even for the most computer savvy person, the rate of software change can be overwhelming. In many cases, your staff is too busy and is not given the time to understand what the changes are before yet another iteration has been introduced. I guess that could be the subconscious excuse for never venturing beyond the basic functionality and just using what they know to get through the day. Simply said, complacency!

From my many years in the heavy equipment software industry, I learned that there are few exceptions to this statement, however, the dealers that do overcome this self-inflicted shortcoming are very successful, not only in the utilization of their business system but also financially.

How do you make time?  Well, it starts from the top down: a commitment from management to the ongoing education of those who use the software every day. You educate your technicians so why not the rest of your staff who use their “tool”, your business system software?

I can also guarantee you that there is functionality that your business system has today that you are not using or are even aware of. You need to understand what’s available at your fingertips. This is followed by the opportunity to test the features and functionality first hand. It’s one thing to sit in a classroom or virtually listening to trainers, it’s another to try it yourself and see it in action; using your data.

Through this learning process, your staff can determine how these capabilities can benefit your day-to-day processes. The goal is to improve efficiency but also the opportunity to gain a better understanding of your customers and the services you offer.

Once you have mastered the commitment to education, challenge yourself and your employees to understand how you can “tweak” or change your business processes to take advantage of functionally and systems you previously deemed unusable.

I recall doing some classroom education many years ago when the dealership principal stood up, interrupted my session, and made the following statement to his staff, “Not changing is not an option!” Imagine if that was your dealership motto?

For more information on our classes and assessments, please visit us at Learning Without Scars.

The Overlooked Telephone Salesperson

/in , /by

The Overlooked Telephone Salesperson

Please enjoy our second vlog of the year.