This good-looking Great Egret chick :) has lots of potential, but it is up to the parent to nourish, encourage, teach, and support development (pretty much like the job of a manager, don’t you think?)


Just as precious ore has little value unless mined and processed, human potential alone has little value unless seasoned through education and refined through purposeful experience. This was true back in Ben Franklin’s time and resonates even more today with the rise of the knowledge worker. Human potential is a requirement as is employee self-motivation, but it is the managers job, no duty, to transform the ore into the silver of success.

Management has three roles in this wealth-creating process:

1. Enabler. Request/demand that all your people have individual development plans that make sense based upon their abilities and goals. Provide funds for quality training and ongoing learning events.

2. Coach. People rarely do what they say they do. If you want to know, spend time with each employee on the job--out visiting customers observing your sellers and services professionals, sitting and listening to your technical support people on the phone, participating with your marketers as they build portfolios or create branding campaigns.

3. Mentor. Proactively select one or two high-potential employees (no more) and explain your openness to mentoring. Schedule time to help them learn the “how to get things done around here” that isn’t in an employee handbook or knowledge management system.

Doing the above not only improves the performance of your team, but is highly self-satisfying. To make it even more enticing, persuade your management group to embrace this best practice:

Goal and reward managers on the progress and performance of their high-potential employees. I’d recommend these two metrics for everyone who manages people:

• Retention of key employees.
• Number or percentage of high-potential employees that get promoted.

Remember that people really are our most important asset, and delivering on that promise is the prime task of management. How are you doing?

I’d be interested in learning your secrets in developing your people.


*Ben Franklin

Tags: training, managing technical talent, leadership

Very strong training, as outlined in Step Three in the Five Steps to Selling Services Success, is a vital catalyst, and is a mandatory start for changing selling behavior. Remember, though, for almost all of your sellers, this is a very big change, and training won't do it alone. Behavior change takes time and support, so be prepared to invest some time and money into it. Instead of thinking a single two- or three-day training event, craft a learning system with ongoing reinforcement over at least a year.

For example, back up the core sales training with a reinforcement workshop within 90 days to let people share successes and practice new skills in a safe environment. Make sure that the date is announced during the core training, and that expectations for the reinforcement workshop are laid out for all participants. Just letting them know that they are to report on the usage of what they will be learning is a powerful motivator. An even more powerful incentive to get them to do what you ask of them is that they don’t want to look stupid to their peers. This will greatly improve the odds ofthem paying attention and taking the training seriously. If you can’t do a face-to-face reinforcement workshop, at least have a reinforcement video teleconference with the same objectives. Though obviously not as powerful as a face-to-face event, a couple hours of a well-facilitated session will still send a strong signal and advance the selling services cause. If you don’t have video capabilities, then an old-fashioned Webinar can do the trick.

Also, make an electronic classroom available to allow for “ask the expert” dialogue and the further sharing of war stories. Participants may not want to “look dumb” to their management, but if trust was developed with the facilitator during the initial training, sellers will be more open to shoot straight and thus get the help they need to improve.

Consider investing money in providing in-field coaching. You are asking salespeople to perform much differently than they have in the past, and providing one-on-one modeling with real customers and coaching afterward are powerful motivators to personal change. In organizations where sales managers are responsible for hands-on coaching of their people and spend most of their time working with their sales reps, it makes sense to extend their skill set to coaching their people on selling services.

Note, however, that there are a couple of challenges to this approach. First, product sales managers within your company may not be much good at selling services either! Unless they have a different background than their sellers, they probably don’t have the right knowledge, skills, and mindsets to coach the selling of services. Before sending them out to coach sellers on how to sell services, they will need to acquire not only the core training provided to the sales force, but additional training in how to coach. Again, this is another investment, but one that will pay off in the long run.

A second consideration is that in some companies “sales management” spends very little time actively managing salespeople. In these companies, sales managers are often the company’s best sellers and have revenue targets of their own. These individuals are key to the company making its numbers. In these situations it is unrealistic to expect that they will be able to provide the reinforcement requirements outlined above. Not that they are lazy or evil, these folks have big bogies to make if they are to be successful, and that trumps people development every time. For example, I have a long-term client that has built his organization’s success by having a very entrepreneurial approach to selling. The sales managers are the top sellers, and it is in the best interest of the company that they spend a minimum of 90% of their time in front of their customers. They contract me to do in-field coaching of their new hires to help accelerate their learning curve and speed their success. If your company follows this model then you should also look for outside expertise to do the one-on-one, in the trenches, customer-facing sales coaching needed to accelerate selling services performance.

GIST: Behavioral change is difficult, and no matter how good the training is, you won’t get the results you want without strong reinforcement.

Tags: selling services, training

Step Three in the Five Steps to Seriously Selling Services involves training. But, not any run-of-the-mill sales training. To be successful you need to invest in quality, services-specific sales training tailored to the issues and uniqueness of your situation. Generic, off-the-shelf packages have their place. SPIN Selling, Professional Selling Skills, and Strategic Selling are all good basic primers for box sellers, but they don’t cut the mustard when selling the invisible. The mindset, approach, knowledge, skills, and tools are different when selling services. Therefore, you need to put everybody through high-quality, services-specific sales training. Find services experts with training competence and tailor a program specific to the needs of your organization. Make certain that the following components are part of the curriculum: why sell services, how to sell intangibles, selling how customers want to buy, building trust, qualifying great services business, developing services power maps, selling services to the “C” level, compressing sales cycle time, and so forth. To keep things interesting and fun, incorporate lots of opportunity for participation, including custom role-plays built around specific scenarios that the sellers must address. It is important to get your product sellers both competent in their selling services capabilities and confident enough that they will try it with customers and prospects.

An important part of any good training is providing usable tools and teaching participants how to use them. Appropriate tools for selling services include feature-benefit profiles for all of your key services offerings, qualifying checklists, case studies of customers espousing the value of using your services, ROI calculators, and sales call planners.

To maximize buy-in to a probably skeptical group, when I develop selling services training I like to involve the top product salespeople, the Ace Flanagans, in the development of the course. I use one-on-one interviews to understand their thinking. I also conduct focus groups with my client’s best and average box sellers to understand their issues and challenges. I always interview sales management to learn their perspectives and their issues. Their participation will not only improve content quality, but also help gain needed credibility for the training. Even better, when possible I conduct interviews of key people within my client’s key customers to learn their issues, expectations, wants, and needs regarding services, and then I build this into the training. This is an extremely powerful way to drive change, as it is fairly easy to dismiss your own views as biased, but it is difficult not to pay attention when your best customers say they want to buy services!

Tags: selling services, training

Would you like to get more from your current resources?



Would you like to get higher billable hours from your technical talent?



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Leading and Managing Technical Talent:

Turning Technical Experts into Trusted Advisors

One-day Workshop

October 25, 2010

San Diego, CA

2010 Service Industry Summit

Technical experts who achieve trusted advisor status with their customers provide your organization with a distinct competitive advantage. Their value to your organization is immense. Yet, on average, only about five percent of technical talent enjoys this special relationship.

This one-day, highly interactive workshop teaches the critical concepts, practices, methods, and tools required to effectively lead and manage your technical talent. Implementing what is taught will help you increase the number of your trusted advisors and improve the competencies of all your people to add more value for your customers and more value to your organization.



There are two ways to attend:

1. Attend the pre-summit workshop for only $799


2. Attend the workshop and the Summit

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What Makes this Workshop Unique?

Dr. Jim Alexander, the workshop leader, has conducted five studies (including the industry leading Transitioning Technical Experts into Trusted Advisors) to determine the best practices that separate the very best from all the rest. In addition, he as consulted and trained organizations on this topic for over 15 years. Therefore, everything taught is research-based, yet highly practical—and actionable. Participants will leave this hands-on session motivated to use the information and tools learned to immediately improve the performance of their technical talent.

Who Should Attend?

Any executive or manager who has responsibility for technical talent who interact with your customers and all others looking for ways to improve profitable growth.

What You Will Learn

• The benefits gained from increasing your number of trusted advisors.

• Highlights from Alexander’s latest trusted advisor research.

• What trusted advisors do that others don’t do.

• Where your people are on the Technical Talent Continuum.

• How your people stack up today on the Trusted Advisor Assessment.

• The six trust builders.

• The 10 commandments of trust-based consulting.

• The 12 success levers.

• The four trusted advisor capabilities.

• The six business development roles.

• Core relationship skills.

• Why everyone who touches the customer needs to sell.

• Influencing with integrity.

• Influencing the senior executive.

• Creating value.

• Steps to increasing your people’s business acumen.

• Special issues in managing knowledge workers.

• How to assess your technical force.

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Tags: managing technical talent, professional services, selling services, training

Would you like to stop giving away or discounting services? Would you like to increase your revenues of both services and products? Would you like to build trust-based relationships that create loyal, profitable customers?

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Selling Services: Tools and Techniques for Top Performance
A two-day, hands-on workshop for everyone tasked with selling services.

August 12-13, 2010
Denver, Colorado

You’ll learn how to sell more services easier and faster from James “Alex” Alexander, a recognized services expert, a master at sales effectiveness, and a top-notch instructor. The course is peppered with lessons learned from star services sellers, best practices in selling services, and proven models and tools that work.

Participants will be actively involved in exercises, discussions, demonstrations, and role play, all linked to selling services success. You will leave the session with enhanced persuasion skills, effective selling tools, and the energy and confidence to accelerate your personal success.

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Who Should Attend?

This workshop is for anyone accountable for selling services. Dedicated services sellers desiring to be more effective, product sellers wanting to win more business, account managers with sales targets, sales and services managers tasked with growth and customer satisfaction, and executives striving to differentiate their business through stellar sales capabilities. If selling services is a part of your job, you will benefit from this course.

How You Will Benefit
The workshop is designed with one goal in mind: to help you and your organization sell more profitable services easier and faster.

Brief Overview of Workshop Topics
Includes 15 Hands-on Tools and Take-Aways!

• The 7 business reasons why you need to sell services
• The technology assimilation gap
• The business development process
• The challenges of selling the invisible
• The biggest seller mistakes
• Buyer’s Reality: What’s diffèrent about buying services?
• The 10 Commandments of Selling Services
• The changing expectations of customer-facing personnel
• 5 reasons why using technical talent is such a good thing
• Choosing which of the six levels of selling expectations is right for each customer-facing group
• How to coordinate services selling efforts to avoid hassle, bad blood, and potential chaos
• Compressing sales cycle time
• How to sell to executives
• The six secrets of the super sellers
• Qualifying great business
• Why a fast no is better than a slow yes
• Using the Six Trust Builders to accelerate trust
• The four trusted advisor competencies
• Core relationship skills
• The 10 persuasion steps
• The 10 step process to selling services success
• The buying process
• Key events
• The committing process
• Profitably managing key accounts

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100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Tags: selling services, training, workshop