We often hear from you “I’m looking for focused, chunked down opportunities to continue to learn and apply my executive selling skills.  What do you offer?”  Today, we offer good news:  We’re launching Know it Now Blended Workshops, a series of workshops that combine self-paced learning applied via executive-led virtual classrooms.

Know it Now Blended Workshops, the latest extension of its Know it Now online learning framework, combines award winning Know it Now self-paced courseware subsequently applied via executive-led virtual sessions, workshops are designed for building specific executive selling skills.

"These workshops are ideal for group or individual use," said Eric Beckman, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Executive Conversation. "The specific focus of each workshop allows sales professionals to strengthen the executive selling skills most valuable to them.”

Three Workshops Available

Appropriate for account managers, sales management, account teams, technical sales and business development managers, choose from these workshops:

• 4 Tenets of Accessing Customer Executives
  Ready to set aside your old beliefs?  While the 4 tenets may seem contrary to what you’ve learned, these truths will position you to generate the type of business curiosity that provokes customers to engage.

• Business Relevant Account Planning
  How could working with a C-level Executive improve your account planning?  Regardless of methodology, effective account plans anchor around validated customer initiatives.  Learn how this is done from a buyer’s perspective.  

• Seller’s 20-Minute Guide to Financial Statements
  Your customers are intimately familiar with their company’s most recent results, are you? For customers large or small, publicly traded or privately held, their financials clearly signal opportunities where you can create demand.   

Special group purchase packages available

Dedicated deliveries and package pricing are available when twelve or more individuals from one company register for the same workshop.  Package pricing is also available for individuals who wish to purchase multiple workshops.

Availability is limited, register today.

Chris Howard, vice president of research and co-founder of Bersin & Associates, shares his insights on critical success factors in effectively leveraging technology for learning and development initiatives.  In recognizing our Know it Now™ online learning platform with a 2010 Learning Leaders Award for Vendor Innovation in Learning and Talent Management, Chris stated “measurable business impact was one of the key things we looked for in choosing winners.”

Q: What questions do you counsel organizations address before investing in online learning?

A: The first generation of online learning basically replaced classroom instruction, taking content and turning into web pages. The resulting courses were often too long and people wouldn’t take them. Organizations should ask themselves:
1) How does learning fit into the overall picture, the overall instructional plan?

2) How can we combine modalities – classroom instruction, eLearning, coaching – so as not to replace classroom instruction, but rather to augment classroom instruction?

Q: For organizations looking to effectively integrate online learning into their development initiatives, what critical success factors should they consider?

A: Measurement should be at the top of the list. In general, measuring learning is a real challenge. Traditional models, with Kirkpatrick probably the most well known are fine, however; our perspective on measurement is that ultimately it’s all around impact.

Many of the Learning Leader applications we received showed a variety of metrics, but measurable business impact is what differentiated the winners. The way I look at learning is like any other business function: once you’re properly aligned with the business impact, you can measure a lot of things.

Executive Conversation’s industry, sales training, is one of the most dynamic examples. Companies may have lots of new products coming out quickly and struggle to keep up training on all products. By setting up training to be readily accessible, chunking it up into pieces and delivering in a variety of modalities, sales people can get it when they need it and resulting sales performance can be tracked.

Q: Learners work on their actual accounts and opportunities to complete activities within Know it Now, in your opinion is the learning efficacy of using such real world scenarios stronger than relying on case materials?

A: Definitely. There’s nothing like getting your hands on the real problem. In the case of sales people, who are not inclined to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time taking a course, this is especially true. We believe if you do the homework upfront and design training to meet the needs of the target audience and the objectives of stakeholders, you can most successfully align with the business model.

Q: What are some of the most common shortcomings you see in leveraging technology for learning and talent management?

A: It gets back to knowing your audience, their tolerance for online media, how much time they’re willing to invest, how they prefer to learn, and the type of training you’re doing. The ‘throw it up and hope they come’ model that people did a few years ago has limited adoptability and was not successful. That’s the biggest misconception — deploying online learning that is not part of a plan or performance assessment or needs analysis and hoping they will come.

Q: Know it Now integrates learning, application and measurement within a single framework, how important is blending each of these elements for effective online learning?

A: The more you can do that the better. However, many organizations don’t have the time or see the importance. That’s where they bring in an organization like yours with the expertise and experience. Our research shows it is certainly optimal if you can have those pieces working together. In our view, the sum then becomes equal to more than the parts.

Q: What technology trends/advances do you see blossoming over the next 12-18 months?

A: The biggest areas we see are social capabilities, the concept of the organization teaching itself after some initial content introduction. We call it ‘we-learning.”. This is where the target community learns from each other with some support from a subject matter expert. This can be done in tandem with a formal initiative, or outside of that when the target audience already knows something about the subject and is just trying to sharpen their skills, or get ideas from someone else. We see training organizations becoming more of a catalyst for this type of collaboration so those in their organization can teach themselves online or offline.

Q: What’s a key area of focus for Bersin & Associates today?

A: We’re definitely focusing on talent development, talent acquisition and talent management strategies. In the sales arena, for example, we’re seeing development techniques designed to increase effectiveness versus simply to ‘sell more’ and using that as the sole basis for promotion. For example, how do we ready those in the sales organization who t exhibit leadership characteristics to take on new management responsibilities? While organizations often want that to happen organically, we’ve seen sales organizations prosper by integrating sales training with bigger programs for becoming a more sophisticated organization.

How do you effectively sell to Chief Information Officers? What are their drivers? A CIO responsible for multiple business units shares his first hand experience.

Insight #1: Know Me Before You Meet Me

Before you enter my office, know me. That may seem challenging since I don’t issue shareholder letters or get written up in the media like a CEO might. But here’s a tip: My priorities as CIO are wholly aligned with the objectives of my company’s CEO and CFO.

Reference annual reports and management presentations to discover objectives my CEO has set for insights into what I’m focused on.

Consider:

• My role is to further these objectives through the smart use of technology.
• My CEO and CFO are spending up to 20% of their time assessing technology decisions – and this percentage is growing.
• As CIO, my team is increasingly relied upon to drive business growth and profitability through application of user friendly technology.
• My clout as CIO within the organization can vary dramatically

To put this all into context, consider the scenario below. It outlines issues a CEO might include in a letter to shareholders and demonstrates how I might use those cues to improve my company’s competitive position through the smart use of technology.

If My CEO/CFO Issues Are To:

• Become more competitive in a more challenging environment
• Drive more profitable revenue
  • Increasing revenue 10-20%
  • Increasing Profit 5-10%
• Acquire other companies to grow market share

Then My Corresponding CIO Issues Are Likely:

• Cut maintenance, administrative and training costs by 50%
• Accelerate time to insight from hours/days to seconds/minutes
• Cut maintenance, administrative and training costs by 50%
• Integrate multiple information systems due to acquisitions

Your next step is to review industry and business analyses for broader insight into my issues and objectives within the context of my organization and industry. Here are four top CIO priorities for you to align your value:

• Delivering projects that enable business growth
• Linking business and IT strategies/plans
• Demonstrating the business value of IS/IT
• Applying metrics to IS organization/services

Insight #2: Apply Metrics to Your Value Propositions

By referencing metrics in your initial discussions with CIOs and later in your value propositions, you demonstrate you understand the linkage between your solution and the CIO’s measures of business performance.

But applying metrics to IT can be difficult. A sales professional who understands this – and is proactive about helping a CIO develop relevant metrics – will do well. Three things to keep in mind:

• Be prepared to add value by suggesting metrics the CIO might use to measure business performance. For instance, recommend metrics your other accounts have found valuable for quantifying impact
• Consider how your value proposition impacts CIO performance metrics
• Ensure the metrics you choose relate directly to the metrics the CIO is using

Using a similar CEO/CFO relationship as discussed earlier, here’s another example of how you may identify metrics to use when engaging CIOs for your value proposition.

If Meaningful Metrics For My CEO/CFO Metrics Are:

• Become more competitive in a more challenging environment
• Drive more profitable revenue
  • Increasing revenue 10-20%
  • Increasing Profit 5-10%
• Acquire other companies to grow market share

Then My Corresponding CIO Metrics Are Likely

• Expedite end-user access to information
  • Accelerate time to insight from 3 days to 2 hours
• System administrative time
  • Reduce from 8 hrs/week to 4 hrs/week per administrator
• Integrate multiple information systems due to acquisitions
  • Reduce reports from 4 separate to 1 integrated

Start Now

So how do you take these insights and sustain them over time?

Suggest an idea about every 90 days that will make the CIO’s organization more competitive through strategic use of technology.

Let us know your thoughts.

We all know customers are fixated on metrics to evaluate technology investments, such as IT spend as a percent of revenue. That’s understandable. The language of business is finance, and organizations know their technology investments must improve the equation. Yet most struggle to translate greater technical capabilities into measurable business value.

So what do you do? You make it easier for them.

When engaging customers, ensure the conversation focuses on the business impact of your solution by moving away from metrics that evaluate technology investments internally and going beyond common measures such as Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Here are some better metrics. Use them to elevate the value you’re delivering to a trusted partner. Use them to help your customer view you favorably relative to your competition. Use them to push through stalled deals because your customer needs clear economic justification to make the business case for investing in your solutions.

• Customer interactions. Show how you can reduce the number of failed interactions. Look at such areas as invoicing inaccuracies, poor order fill rates, incomplete transactions or failure to ship a product on time. Show how you can create an alert system to improve visibility/ability to identify areas at risk of failing. Customers will welcome your ideas as quantifying customer satisfaction is always difficult. Be specific when you quantify solution value. The better you do this, the more credibility you’ll have with executives.
• Innovation to support ratio. Show how you can help customers sharply improve the percentage of their technology spend devoted to driving business growth relative to internal support. Plot your proposed projects and any competing projects on a grid (see below) to present your customer a view of this ratio. Leading companies target a 3:1 ratio and want it trending upward.
  
• Customer usage. Present a plan to help measure how many customers will actually use the alternative new products, services, features or tools your customer is evaluating. For example, from a revenue perspective, show how to measure whether partners and suppliers are collaborating to reduce time to market for product development. Demonstrate a way to track new markets, channels or cross-selling opportunities resulting from your solution. Suggest how your new service could be more effective and/or cost-effective than competing solutions.
• Cost of doing nothing. Quantify the true cost of taking no action. For instance, the investment can be justified by comparing the cost of continuing to use a largely manual process to the cost of the automated solution you’re proposing. Or compare the existing mix of in-house and outsourced resources to your solution and show the impact on how employees spend their time.

What are some example you’ve seen work effectively?

Targeting customers in the service provider space? If you want to gain credibility and create differentiation, you’ll have to brush up on that market’s unique industry-specific metrics.

But how do you find the right metrics for your targeted customer?

We’ve developed this short format overview for exactly that purpose. In addition, use Analyst Reports. These reports used to benchmark companies are an ideal resource for identifying industry and customer-specific metrics.

Service Providers