point of need training

Buyers Don’t Follow a Linear Path anymore so why ask your sales team to do the same?

The sales funnel relies on the theory that someone comes into the top of the funnel and sales fall out the bottom. But is that true in today’s world? Do we start at the top and make our way through to the end? Or do we start at the top, leave, jump levels, come back, leave again, come back at the beginning and some point come back and buy or totally just leave? Are sales people following a linear purchase pattern or an erratic path of engagement that sometimes results in less and fewer sales?

Distraction is the Number One Barrier to Sale

Distraction is destroying the Sales Funnel. It’s clear that buyer behaviour is erratic, but they are also finicky and overloaded with information.. Distraction may very well be the number one barrier to a sale. We get distracted and abandon our cart. We stop reading the article that brought us to you. Simply put, any little distraction means we move on to something else and we may never come back. We are also finicky buyers, what we think one day may be dramatically changed by another piece of content that contradicts our previous opinion.

Let’s take a look at the Sales Funnel Concept.

The sales funnel has been around for as long as any of us has been in business. It is a tool that has been used to visualize everything from the sales process to marketing impact on an organization. I use to be a fan of the sales funnel. But the truth is, the traditional sales funnel model has been dead for years; we just haven’t come to accept it yet. They say a picture paints a thousand words, the problem is clients are overloaded with the same information. .

Buying patterns have changed drastically in the last decade. They’ve changed so much that they have truly broken the sales funnel as we know it.

Old habits die hard, so the big question is whether or not a sales funnel is still a viable model for sales concepts. Here are the biggest challenges I see with the sales funnel in today’s buying environment.

Selling the way your customer wants to buy…Not the way you like to sell

Sales Plan Mapping is all about Rapport. Rapport is defined as:

“A state of mutual trust and respect existing between two or more people. Rapport is the primary basis for all successful communication.”

Sales Plan Mapping is all about Rapport. Rapport is defined as: “A state of mutual trust and respect existing between two or more people. Rapport is the primary basis for all successful communication.” To build rapport with someone you have not met face to face is a learned skill referred to as NLP.

Learning to Plan a Sales map requires knowledge in a new type of Consultative Selling. Planning a Sale Map would mean learning new skills in 5 key areas:

Best Practices
Communication Skills
Strategy and Traction
Sales Project Management
Presentation

The strategic role of continuous education

One way to stay on top of a rapidly changing market is to implement a business strategy that maximises the synergies between lifelong learning and workforce productivity.

Without appropriate technological support, training programs appear to be less effective. No matter the size of your business, if you stand still and basque in your current success, this is surely the biggest route to new challenges.

Even though research has shown that E-Learning proves to be an excellent way to achieve quality results in a short timeframe, most users still only dabble with free flimsy or overbearing solutions that provide no tracking, evidence or further sign posting to continue competence training.

Getting the world back to work with skills we can trust

Point of Need Online-delivered learning, using mobile technology within a context of continuous education, is considered strategic because it:

Keeps the workforce appraised of their job functions’ developing requirements, enabling them to make a positive impact on their role individually and as a team and help that Organisation achieve its aims and goals
Aids succession planning, helping workers to acquire the knowledge and skills to help them progress within their Organisation
Allows Organisations to keep training budgets under tighter control, develop and retain existing employees and reduce the costs related to external human resources recruitment, selection and on-boarding

The current speed of change means that employees need to be trained continuously for Companies to avoid the dangers of being out-thought and out-manoeuvre by competitors especially on qualities such as leadership.

A poorly educated workforce results in decreased, indeed ever decreasing, levels of productivity and reduces their ability to deliver results. Ignorant and poorly skilled staff can’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) be promoted — since they don’t have the appropriate skills to help their company reach its business objectives. So Organisations need to go to the expense, in terms of time and trouble, of recruiting staff with new knowledge and competencies from outside the organisation to cover middle and senior level positions. It’s important to realise that not only does this practice have a negative impact on the organisation, regarding high costs per individual worker, but company results show that this approach isn’t always successful.

According to recent research (Lifelong Education and Labour Market Needs, published in The EvoLLLution online newspaper) examining the need for continuing education in the workforce, 64% of executives who are recruited externally fail within four years of joining the organisation.

Ideally, every company should have a Personal Training Needs Analysis plan in place for each of their employees. This project should engage the employee in identifying training programs that will enable the employees to develop the necessary knowledge and skills specific to them.

How can we help up-skill your sales team without them taking too much time of work?

Modernising your Sales Team – Project Manage Sales Mapping Whitepaper by Diane Shawe M.Ed

Prison education must improve, Michael Gove says, failures were “indefensible”

article by Diane Shawe

Education in prisons must be overhauled in order to tackle a “persistent failure to reduce re-offending”, the justice secretary is to say. Michael Gove stressed in a speech that helping prisoners become literate and numerate makes them “employable”.

Diane Shawe states “The only thing worse than training prisoners and having them stay, is not training them and having them leave”

Whilst the Prison Governors Association welcomed the proposals, as usally after making no practical contribution to change in terms of prisons education, raised concerns about how changes would work in practice.

Earlier this week, chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick said the government’s “rehabilitation revolution”, launched five years ago at the outset of the coalition, had not even started.

He said in his last annual report that prisons were in their worst state for a decade and some jails were “places of violence, squalor and idleness”.

Prison education, work and re-offending

£145m spent every year in England and Wales on prison education
95,300 offenders over 18 were in education in 2013/14
Almost half of adult prisoners re-offend within one year of their release
60% re-offend if they serve sentences of less than a year
Two-thirds of offenders under 18 re-offend within twelve months of release

In his first speech on the issue since being appointed as justice secretary in May, Mr Gove is expected to say that society is collectively to blame for the failure to “redeem and rehabilitate” offenders, and he will call for an end to the “idleness and futility” of prison life.

The justice secretary says he wants to look at “earned release” for offenders who are committed to education and gain qualifications that are respected by employers.

If prisons moved to such a system, it would be a major change from the current policy under which most prisoners are automatically released on licence at the halfway point of their sentence.

Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison Reform Trust, said: “The challenge now is to translate this marked new reflective tone set by the Justice Secretary into sensible policy and to create a just, humane and effective penal system.”

Educating prisoners can turn them into “contributors to society”

“No government serious about building one nation, no minister concerned with greater social justice, can be anything other than horrified by our persistent failure to reduce re-offending,” Mr Gove is expected to say at the event in London, hosted by the Prisoner Learning Alliance.

“In prisons there is a – literally – captive population whose inability to read properly or master basic mathematics makes them prime candidates for re-offending.

“Ensuring those offenders become literate and numerate makes them employable and thus contributors to society, not a problem for our communities.

Diane Shawe CEO of Express Training Courses (AVPT short courses Ltd) is concerned that once again emphasis is placed on numeracy and literacy which failed most of them at school and not enough critical thinking is placed on providing life skills and soft skills.

Gove states “The failure to teach our prisoners a proper lesson is indefensible. I fear the reason for that is, as things stand, we do not have the right incentives for prisoners to learn or for prison staff to prioritise education. And that’s got to change.”

Mr Gove is also expected to use the speech to propose giving governors more control and rewarding them if offenders do well.

He will say that one of the “biggest brakes on progress” in all prisons is the “lack of operational autonomy and genuine independence enjoyed by governors” – who are often set very tight criteria on how prison life should be managed.

“Yet we know from other public services – from the success of foundation hospitals and academy schools – that operational freedom for good professionals drives innovation and improvement. So we should explore how to give governors greater freedom – and one of the areas ripest for innovation must be prison education.”

It is about time we had some proper joined up thinking, Gove as usual like to deal with the problem straight on whilst some around him loves to keep the mother of all restriction and red tap rolling even when they can see there is no progress.

What do we do..

We specialise in resourcing short courses via a pre-populated LMS solution for Point of Need Training via mobile devices so that all different levels of student can access training whilst on the move using their own device supported by one off our virtual tutors to help them complete their online 4 weeks course. We also specials is short intense classroom style training with student manuals and supportive adult educational material for Learning by Doing in a range of Soft Skills courses.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-33554573 17th June 2015