Monthly Archives: August 2008

Knowledgeable Staff Sell More & Give Better Service

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Last night I went for dinner at St-Hubert Barbecue http://www.st-hubert.com/en/menu.php with my friends from the Beaconsfield Cylce Club http://www.clubcycliste.com/english/ after a fast Tuesday night ride.

The place was very busy and noisy and so the service was a little slow. After reviewing the menu I decided to eat light with a salad but they had three appealing salads on the menu. I asked the harried waitress what was the difference and she looked at me dumbfounded and tried to muster up an explanation. It was obvious that she did not know about each salad and asked me what the names of the various salads were hoping that would give her some clues about what to answer. I said I wasn’t sure so she picked up the menu and said let me show you the pictures so you can see the differences.

I thought to myself that this person does not know her product and it caused me to have doubts about whether their salads we popular and thus fresh. This is a good example of where a poorly informed and less knowledgeable sales person can cause the customer to doubt and maybe not buy.

Is there a relation to this and training? I think so as any good training and development program would make sure that their salespeople know their product before they send them out on the field. But is the person in question a salesperson or a server? Both I say since how she performs her job directly impacts sales as well as the  customers experience.

I used the word development as part of training because to me the development part signifies a process not just an event. Training, given or taken as an event never gives a good ROI because it is easily forgotten and not sufficiently reinforced in most cases. In fact yesterday I made a follow-up call with a business owner I met over a year ago and asked him to meet again to discuss using my services for business development coaching. He agreed but shared with me how skeptical he is because of his past experience working with consultants for various things including leadership coaching. He said that after the fact nothing stuck and he did not see any return on investment.

A development process conducted with a specific well founded goal in mind and a commitment by top management to push forward on the intitiative is much different than a training event. A good process must include a solid follow-up plan that ties into a performance management system, including performance appraisals and compensation decisions. Of course a commissioned salesperson’s compensation is directly affected by their performance so why include them in a performance management system, you could ask?

Every employee forms part of the organizational culture and climate and if the ownership embraces a continuous improvement type of culture, how can it allow a select few to decide their own behaviour and performance? How would you sell others on committing to behaviours that contribute to a continuous improvement and team oriented culture? It’s not possible, you must get everyone on board and convince or replace those who resist.

St-Hubert barbecue needs to work on their training and development program. Perhaps like many restaurant franchisors, they do provide the guidelines and support to their franchisees and this is where the problem is. The franchisee owner does not understand or take the time to invest in the tools provided for training and coaching staff so they best serve the customers and sell more. Again as always, it all comes down to leadership.

Stephen Goldberg

Work less, earn more

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I have started writing a series of articles in my newsletter on this topic of working less and earning more because I think this is ultimately the goal of every business owner and can become the ultimate dilemma as well.

Businesses go through growth stages like a human being and I am not necessarily talking about the sales growth or market share growth. You can be number one in an extremely small niche market and still work alone or with an assistant. And today you can have virtual assistants through websites such as www.elance.com or www.guru.com.

What I mean by growth stages is going from a solopreneur to an organization of hundreds or thousands of employees. The transition process can be very difficult and very few out of those who start out actually are able to survive. Most people end up just keeping things manageable by limiting the growth and having just enough people so managing does not get too difficult.

But growing a larger organization can be exciting and rewarding because it provides you with the opportunity to build an independent organization that you can sell or that can function without you. It also provides a great opportunity to grow as a person and leader. Through the process of organizational development you can see your vision being realized through the combined efforts of a lot of people. I think that this is really the biggest reward that one can have because building that kind of organization requires developing yourself and your people. In the end or along the journey you become something you were not before and so do the people you bring along for the ride.

So where are your journeying too and what do you want the ride to be like? How do you want people to get along on the journey? Should it be a competitive journey or a smooth and fun ride most of the time. The answers would depend on what most motivates you and what you want to experience. When this is clear you can attract those that share the same values or feelings about the kind of organizational climate they want to work in.

Multi-level marketing is another way to earn more and work less if one can become successful in building an autonomous organization with many solid functioning levels. Those that succeed in this type of business all express how they have grown through the process. The reason is because to stick it out and go through the hard stuff you need to work on yourself, your attitude, beliefs, weaknesses, etc. You need to dampen your fears and accentuate your strengths and qualities. Very few out of those start are able to succeed and last. Maybe they have a higher pain tolerance level than those who quit. It’s like the top athletes, who can stand the most pain to push yourself that extra little bit?

To summarize here are the main points an entrepreneur who wants to build an autonomous workforce needs to consider.

  1. Have a vision for what you want to create and accomplish.
  2. Understand yourself and the people you want to join you.
  3. Define how people will behave in their jobs and what kind of organizational climate this will create.
  4. Learn how to manage your state in order to ride the difficult periods and situations.
  5. Keep developing all aspects of yourself so you are better equipped to deal with bigger issues and challenges.
  6. Hire and train the best you can find and afford. Make managers out of employees and leaders out of everyone.
  7. Track what is important to measure.
  8. Encourage others to solve their own problems so you can concentrate on new ideas and strategies.
  9. Praise and recognize those that merit it.
  10. Celebrate your successes big and small.

If this makes sense to you, stick this list on a wall (I am doing it now) so you can see it everyday and remind yourself of what is really important and if you don’ do it, who will?

Stephen Goldberg, sgoldberg@optimusperformance.ca

Contact me, I can help

Chinese Innovation

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This morning I was watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games in Beijing and they were showing early Chinese innovations like paper, printing and the compass. I didn’t know these things originated in China. The artists were putting on a beautiful and spectacular demonstration that was artistic and highly technical and disciplined.

Yesterday I met a business owner near my office to talk about developing a high performance organization and to see if we could work together to improve his business, I had met Tim a few months ago when I was acting as a judge for the local Chamber of Commerce Accolades award for the most innovative company in the region. I remembered the visit I had made with the two other judges and how I was impressed with the small innovative and flexible firm he had built. They had managed to take standard everyday products and develop them into new designs and functions that addressed specific needs in niche markets.

I had bought along an article http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=3009ca9f-f412-4050-b64e-6a3e91049ffb that talked about how important innovation is to competing globally and gave an example of a firm in Ontario that was leading in their field because of their innovative approach to their product and market, as well as they way they functioned.

We talked about China and the challenge that manufacturers face because of the easier access to products from there and China’s great ability to manufacture at a much lower cost. He told me of his experience with trying to outsource some manufacturing to China and how it failed. He said that they are good for producing high volume low quality products. I felt differently because although I see that many low priced products produced there are generally lower quality, I have seen great improvements in the quality of many products from China over the years. Tim pointed out that larger firms are able to handle their own quality control in China or build factories in partnership with local owner/operators.

Learning this morning about China’s past and it’s remarkable innovations clashed in my mind with the observation made by Tim. We has also talked about what it takes to build a high performance autonomous workforce and the key point we agreed on was that it takes a continuous improvement attitude from all people in the organization to not only drive innovative thinking but to empower people to do so. This is scary for many small and medium size business owners because it means giving up power and control to a great degree to your people. At the same time not doing so hinders the potential growth of the organization as well stunts creative thinking and thus makes the organizationless inflexible and less able to compete.

In my mind, this is what happened in China. The great discoveries and innovations were made long before the restrictiveness of communistic rule began to act on the psyche of the Chinese population. Since then China has become a land of control and imitation. They seems to be great at replicating what others are creating and doing it fast and less costly.

For North American manufacturers to survive and grow, they must foster innovation and continuous improvement throughout the organization and the attitude for this begins with the president and his executive team. They must be willing to embrace a management style that promotes creativity and open sharing of ideas. They must also realize the importance and value in generating strong team spirit throughout the departments. To do this requires the top leaders to examine and improve their own leadership and teamwork behaviours and insists that those they manage do the same. This will then drift down throughout the organization and when reinforced will become the behaviour to emulate and thus mold the culture of the enterprise.