For their new book—Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies From The World’s Sales Leaders—Thomas Baumgartner, Jon Vander Ark, and Homayoun Hatami observed the inner workings of successful companies. Based on interviews of more than 120 of today’s most successful global sales leaders, this book offers real-life examples of how they overcame difficulties and found growth in a challenging market.
Part of finding growth is developing a sales team. While mentoring is a learning process, it shouldn’t feel like going back to a high school lecture hall. In this excerpt from the book, the three partners in McKinsey & Company talk about trainers and coaches who apply the tenets of successful adult education to their programs. Adults retain the most new information by doing—not hearing—and companies that integrate hands-on learning into their mentoring programs can benefit from that built-in bias. The authors also address how to reinforce successes while also giving special attention to those who need it. The excerpt closes with an innovative method of coaching the coach, an investment that for one company yielded an impressive return in close rates.
EXCERPT:
Coach Rookies Into Rainmakers
Unlocking people’s potential to maximize their performance is about helping them to learn rather than teaching them. This form of coaching is critical in sales because adults learn best through “experiential” learning—that is, by doing. Studies have shown that adults retain 65 percent of experiential learning compared to just 10 percent of material they receive in a lecture setting or in demonstrations. Continue reading »
By Erica Christoffer, Multimedia Web Producer, REALTOR® Magazine
A few months ago, Dan Burrus was sitting in a café in Istanbul making a call to his wife in Barcelona using Apple’s iPhone-to-iPhone FaceTime video chat. He was able to see her in high definition and hear her as clearly as if she were sitting next to him, even though he was in the Middle East and she was in Europe.
This example of technology provides us a small glimpse into our future, says Burrus, a futurist and author of Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and do the Impossible (HarperCollins, 2011).
Are you interested in predicting the future? Try this:
How much do you know about the iPhone 6? No one’s talking about it because we don’t even have an iPhone 5 yet. So you might say, “I don’t know anything about it.” But in actuality, you know a lot, says Burrus. Will it have a faster processor than the iPhones that came before it? Of course it will. Will be have more memory? You already know. Will it offer more cloud computing options? You bet. Might we be able to tap into a “Watson” computer in the cloud, giving us a supercomputer in the palm of our hand? The possibility is very likely.
There has never been more opportunity than there is today because technology is leveling the playing field, Burrus says. He predicts that in the next five years, you’re going to see a continued technological transforming in how we sell, market, communicate, train, innovate, and collaborate.
“One of the reasons I did not call the book ‘Flash Hindsight,’ is because we’re already good at saying we should have done this or that,” says Burrus. “The beautiful thing about foresight is you can take actions today to shape that future.”
The Flash Foresight methodology can also be used as a crystal ball to reveal what’s in store for the real estate industry. Continue reading »
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