Efficiency. Intimate training environments. Scale. Does your company strive to achieve all three of these important aspects of business when it comes to learning and development? Is it even possible at all anymore? Unfortunately, many training teams are challenged as companies grow and budgets shrink, making it harder and harder to engage all employees by creating impactful, energetic training. Sure, remote e-learning addresses issues of efficiency and scale, but what about the benefits that only come from being up-front and personal in smaller, face-to-face engagements? And how do you do that while maintaining the amount of control your company requires? One solution may lie in a different approach, one that may be difficult for some training teams to swallow: outsourcing to line managers.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Blogs/ASTD-Blog/2013/03/Designing-Manager-Led-Training
A review of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2013/03/Books-Sales-R-Us
In our second post, we discussed the five ways to tell if your sales organization is ready to elevate sales and deploy a higher-level selling approach, called Point of View Selling. Forum’s research shows that in today’s market, this approach makes a big difference – and your organization doesn’t need to have the resources of a Fortune 500 company to implement it. Let’s look at an example of one salesperson at a mid-sized company and how he changed his selling landscape with a point-of-view approach.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Blogs/Sales-Enablement-Blog/2013/01/WHAT-DOES-IT-TAKE-to-DEPLOY-a-POINT-of-VIEW-SELLING-APPROACH-Part-3-of-3
A recent study identifies the similarities and differences between executives, superior managers, and top salespeople.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2012/11/Sales-Managers-or-Sales-Leaders
When you examine the BEST award-winning organizations during the past decade, several key characteristics emerge. These winning organizations have metrics that matter—inclusion of learning objectives as part of individual performance goals, a clear link between learning and performance, an appropriate blend of learning delivery methods, and visible support from senior leaders—but one dominant characteristic is a part of all of them: a culture of learning.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2012/10/BEST-Additional-Winners
You outsold your colleagues and put your company ahead of the competition, so you've just been rewarded with a big promotion to sales manager. Congratulations! Now for the rub: You've gone from being an expert salesperson to an incompetent manager—and on top of that, you may be stuck doing your old sales job while you transition to your role as sales manager. Your team (you outsold them all, remember?) can't put out their own fires, and you're the last one to leave every night. Your superiors grunted something about management classes at the local college, which don't start until next semester. In other words, you're a rookie again, and you're on your own.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Blogs/Sales-Enablement-Blog/2012/09/Book-Brief-the-Accidental-Sales-Manager
It’s hard to believe that summer is nearly at an end. But there is still time to not only soak in a few extra hours of daylight, but also to make great use of the longer days by checking out a few 2012 releases on how people and organizations can improve their sales effectiveness. (And, we even included a 2011 release you may have missed.) Happy reading.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Blogs/Sales-Enablement-Blog/2012/07/Sales-Summer-Reading-List-2012
Within the sales word, managers strive for balance between the ever-changing approaches to sales markets and organizational goals. Brian Lambert in Assessing Readiness for Change in the Sales Organization (T+D, 2009) has not only identified this problem, but proposed a solution.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Blogs/Sales-Enablement-Blog/2012/07/Article-from-TD-Vault-Assesses-Sales-Readiness-for-Change
Training for the neglected sales manager must entail more than leadership and coaching how-to’s.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2012/06/Your-Guide-to-Developing-Sales-Managers
Results from the Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study provide insight on how best to enrich the development of salespeople.
http://www.astd.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2012/06/Turn-Sales-Leadership-Strategies-Into-Training-Actions