You Do Not Plough With A Peacock

Mercy was employed as an accountant by one of our clients. She had been good at her work but over time her performance has been deteriorating. She was put on performance notice. She had given up on her fate in the organization until one time her boss gave me a call. She asked me to administer our psychometric tests on her.

It is through our two tests that we had helped the organization hire it's 3 top sales people in the last 2 years. Mercy was not impressed by the fact that she was being asked to take some tests that she knew her sales colleagues had taken. She had been a trained accountant. She did not have anything to lose except some 45 minutes to do the test.

Once the tests were completed we sent the report to her boss. Mercy was a lion. Among the three sales people we had hired one of them was a lion while the other two were horses. (We have 21 animals that represent different personalities). The boss was not shocked. She was also a lion and that is what frustrated her so much about Mercy. She knew she could work and get the results.

We had a meeting where we presented the report to Mercy and her boss and made a suggestion that probably it would be good idea if Mercy moved from accounts into account relations management role. In accounts she worked a lot with paper work and was expected to stick to a routine. As a lion this was not easy. She got motivated by tangible achievements and pursuing goals. She enjoyed taking leadership roles and taking up challenging roles. All these were available in the account management role.

Within a month Mercy had started bringing in orders from previously dormant accounts. She was the employee of the month. She was not yet the top sales person but she was so committed to becoming one within the next six months.

Mercy is like many other employees. People who could be easily described as role pegs fitted into square holes. They hold onto a job because of the paycheck. There performance is ok due to sheer commitment but in many cases they will never be spectacular in the job. Their position or role does not utilize their strengths. If you have a hunting position you don’t use a sheep for it, get a lion.

There are other employees who never get to know themselves and as a result try to fit into a mold they suppose is expected of them. They are copies of others rather than the best original of themselves. Self awareness is probably the most important element in emotional intelligence. When we are aware of our qualities we are able to turn them into strengths and be aware of them when they are our blind spots in the roles that we have. We get to know why we do things the way we do them and how that impacts the results we get as well as how we relate with others either as colleagues subordinates and bosses.

When filling a role it is sometimes to try creating the profile of the candidate that will best in a position and pursue that candidate. Other times it has been found that candidates of a particular personality type fit in a certain organization while another might struggle. This is because built in an organizations culture is its personality. That is one reason why an employee who was a super star performer in an organization struggles in a similar role in another organization and vice versa. It is synonymous in having a peacock amongst plough bulls or a hare among German Shepherds.

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Email: info@growthpartners.co.ke or Call +254 20 8012627 to book your spot

STRATEGIC SELLING SKILLS COURSE

Win More Business, More Often from Large Companies, Multi Nationals, NGOs and Public Sector Institutions 

Faced with customers who are more demanding more value at lower prices, competitors who are more vicious and  a market that is seeking to commoditize every value, today’s sales person needs to be more strategic in his/her approach to win more clients, close more sales and protect their customers from the competition.

Strategic Selling Skills Course has been designed to equip sales people with essential skills, techniques, tools and strategies to thrive and excel in this environment.

Sales person who is armored with right weapons will outperform every other sales person who is not well equipped.

Course Objectives:

The course is designed and delivered, to equip the sales people with the skills, tools, strategies and  tactics to accomplish the following:

1.Close more profitable and large sales to achieve company and personal sales goals;

2.Generate and develop high potential  sales opportunities;

3.Overcome fear of talking to key decision makers large prospects and clients;

4.Create, manage and nurture relationships that would open up new opportunities and get sales closed;

5.Build and manage an ever rich business pipeline with opportunities that convert;

6.Unlock various obstacles that are thrown in the way of making a big sale;

7. Adopt a sales approach that is consistent with their personality strengths while utilizing other tools to manage around personality weaknesses;

8. Aggressively and tactically follow-up of high value opportunities;

9. Be results focused  in planning and execution of their sales calls and meetings;

10.Make winning  presentations to decision makers;

11.Carry out persuasive sales conversations with senior executives;

12.Initiate and manage relationships with quality prospects who are easy to convert into customers.

Course Content

The course will be covered as follows:

Module	Content
Pipeline Management	Customer Profiling Lead Generation Strategies Prospect Qualification Prospect Nurturing Follow-Up Management
Consultative Selling	The Consultative Process Effective Presentations Objection Handling Closing Mastery
Sales Communications	Effective Presentations Nonverbal Communication Sales Conversations Persuasion Strategies
Selling to Large Organizations	Tactical Vs Strategic Selling Value Design Buyer Influences
C-Level Selling	What CEOs Want Conversations that Win CEOs Managing CEO Relationships
High Value Client Relationships	From a Customer to a Client Lifetime Value of a Customer Customer Relationship Model Techniques for Growing Customer Relationship
Leveraging your Sales Personality Strengths	Know your Sales Personality Discover your Sales Strengths Putting Your Strengths to Work Managing Sales Personality Weaknesses

 Investment

Investment: KES 28,500 +VAT per Participant

Venue

The Nairobi Safari Club

Date

September 8th & 9th 2016

Lead Facilitator

Sam Kariuki- Course Designer & Lead Facilitator

Sam Kariuki is a sales strategist and business growth consultant. He helps set up high performance sales organizations, develop sales growth strategies, design scalable business models, identify and remove sales growth constraints and trains business owners, managers and sales staff on ways to effectively grow revenues, open new markets, acquire new customers and multiply value from existing customers.

Sam has developed various tools that help businesses hire top sales producers and develop existing ones to achieve set targets.

Sam has over 10 years’ experience in sales training, sales recruitment and business advisory. He has trained and consulted for various blue chip companies, Small & Mid Sized Businesses and International Development Organizations across East Africa. Organizations that have engaged Sam have developed new revenue streams, experienced increased sales, developed professional sales teams and increased returns on their sales and marketing expenditure.

He the author of the highly acclaimed novel The Guy Who Fired His Boss, which is a book showing how to evaluate a business idea, design it into a business and build a successful business venture. He has contributed articles to various business publications including Business Daily, Marketing Africa, and Selling Power East Africa among others.

He holds various qualifications including a Degree in Marketing from University of Nairobi and Executive Diploma in Marketing from Marketing Society of Kenya.

<sup>Registration

To Register for the course contact Kendi 

Tel: +254 20 801 26 27 
Cell: +254 711 671 843
        +254 772 12 52 79</sup> 
Email: kendi@growthpartners.co.ke

 

Banned: Now Lectures Prohibited in Delivery of Business Courses

A few years ago the major Kenyan hospitals banned the prescription of cough syrups for kids in their facilities. Cough syrups by then were among the most prescribed drugs in the country, especially for children who had coughs. The hospitals observed that these medicines, though a big money maker for them and the pharmaceutical firms, at best did not work and at worst caused more harm than treatment.

Today Growth Partners is making a similar declaration in relation to use of lectures as a way of delivering its training programs. We can confidently say that lectures don’t leave the trainees any better and hence companies are losing money through courses delivered through lectures.

Lectures may be good in universities but that is where they should remain. In fact, many learning experts have rated lectures as very lowly when it comes to teaching adults anything.

Missing Customer Expectations

What do you want from a training session? Whether sponsors or a participants we have found out that our clients’ expectations fall into three broad categories:

•  Behavior and attitude change after the training;
•  Ease of recall and practice of the lessons learnt at work ;
• Better task performance as a result of applying the skills and knowledge acquired in the training.

We have used these expectations to gauge the effectiveness of our training programs, which have been at least 50% PowerPoint driven lectures. We are embarrassed to concede that our content/presentation driven training approach fall short of measuring up to these expectations. This is regardless of the fact that our training materials and presentation approach is way much superior to what other trainers offer. Most of our training clients have given us raving reviews. Our philosophy has always been – don’t pay if you don’t get value. So far we have not had a single client who has refused to pay because they did not get value.

Unfortunately, this still has greatly missed on achieving the key success measures of any training intervention, which can be summarized in the expectations mentioned above. Our customers have been judging us on how impressive we have been in presentations and mastery of content and consequently missed on what matters most – impact post training. I still maintain that we are great at making presentations and everyday we have refined on our style and approach. We have invested time and money in the same.

Learning is not a Spectator Sport

Our lectures have been highly refined in content. We have always used top most subject experts to deliver the courses. We have impressed the participants with our mastery of the subject. We have been passionate about our areas and invest heavily to become better every day. However, regardless of this we have been giving our customers a raw deal through the best PowerPoint led lectures and presentations.

We have been mistaken to think training is a spectator sport, where the star is the trainer and Growth Partners.

Lectures Strictly Prohibited

That’s why effective today, we are banning use of lectures in our programs. We will use PowerPoint only as one of the visual aids, and not necessarily the most important of these aids as it has been for a long time.

In line with this ban we are declaring the following principles as the beacons to guide and direct development and delivery of our courses:

1.       Our programs will no longer be organized to deliver training but provide learning experience

 2.     We will consider those who go through our courses are learning partners, not participants. As a result every group will be invited to facilitate learning for we will become a learning community

 3.    We will no longer have trainers spewing knowledge and information to the learning partners but learning facilitators who will guide and direct the learners in the process of discovery and creation of knowledge, information and skills as well as application of the same

 4.      We recognize the unique learning preferences of the various people who attend our courses as well as appreciate learning best takes place when the whole person is involved in learning and as such we will design and deliver learning programmes using a variety of activities to involve as many senses as possible

5.       People learn best by doing not hearing and watching. They will learn sales by selling, management by managing, leadership by leading and customer care by practicing it. As such everyone who partakes in our courses will need to practice as much as possible during the course what they have learnt.

Surest Way to Maximize ROI on Training Investment

We appreciate that by adopting these principles, our work in preparation and facilitation will be more demanding. We also recognize that many traditional organizations might still want us to do training the old presentation/lecture way but, we will not waver in ensuring that we stick to these principles. We will be committed to them because it will help unlock the full learning potential of those who come to our courses.

We also believe in that the only justifiable reason for us to be in business is to give more value than we are paid for and thus by being faithful to these principles we will maximize returns on training investments made by organizations and individuals that pay us to improve skills and performance of their people.

Our lead consultant has taken a very intensive course led by a leading American Accelerated Learning Expert on how to develop and deliver courses that will transform the participants. With the lessons learnt and many materials acquired in the process we believe we will give the best value for money for all those who will be trained by us.

We note that although all the respectable hospitals do not prescribe cough syrups to kids many pharmacies and small clinics continue to stock and sell them. The reason for this is that old habits are hard to break. We expect the same from those who are stuck to being prescribed to lectures. But if they give us a chance we will show a very different approach.

Hire Now Pre-Selected, Trained Sales Executives at No Cost

You can now have access to a pool of high aptitude, driven and trained sales executives who start delivering sales results within the shortest time possible.

Over the last 6 years we have developed and proven tools that measures a person’s sales aptitude and have had over 70% success rate in identifying a great candidate from average people. Since 2008 we have developed some of the cutting edge sales training solutions and we have identified the essential sales competencies that a candidate needs to excel in sales. We have also developed various tools that have aided some sales people manage themselves so as to perform at their highest potential.  All along employers paid to access these capabilities. Now they have a choice to enjoy the benefits of all these with minimal investment- actually Zero Cost.

Growth Partners has set up a Sales Talent Academy. The objective of this talent academy is to source for young people with a high aptitude for sales and have the right personality traits. Once selected through our rigorous sales talent selection process, we equip them with the essential selling skills and show them how to excel in a sales position. Once they are ready for employment we make the candidate available to reputable organizations for consideration.

Once a candidate is hired we provide on-boarding coaching so as they can master the employers business quickly, define a success path and start delivering results within the shortest time possible. The new hire will have access to our all sales expertise till.

To get the candidate who is best cut for sales we use 2 of our proprietary psychometric tools:

§  Sales Aptitude Test

§  Sales Behavior Profiler

These tools removes subjectivity, guesswork and impact of halo effect in determining the appropriateness of a candidate for  a sales role.

As an employer you will end up with a sales executives who:

§  Settle quickly in their role and start producing within the shortest time possible;

§  Will consistently achieve their targets;

§  Require minimum supervision in their work;

§  Determined to succeed self-motivated,  confident,  resourceful,  assertive  and  decisive

§  Highly confident and enthusiastic in their job;

§  Cope well with frequent frustration, rejection and stress.

§  Will persevere in finding solutions to difficult problems in their work;

§  Are resilient and rebound quickly following defeats which are common in sales;

§  Are unlikely to be undermined by off-the job problems;

§  Are energized by success to seek out more challenges and opportunities.

§  Believe success is achievable

Our goal is to get, develop and place candidates who can end up in the top 20% of sales producers in their organizations.

The cost of all this work will be catered for by the candidate through the recruitment fee which will be paid from the candidates earning.

Previously, we have charged organizations for the recruitment process (without the training and on-boarding support) equivalent to a month salary of the candidate.

To learn more on how to engage a high performance sales candidate please email us on info@growthpartners.co.ke or call +254 20 8012627.

How to Get the Most out of Psychometric Tests

Many recruiting managers are turning more and more to psychometric testing in their pursuit of getting that one great new hire. This is driven by frustration of failure of conventional interviewing and a desire to be as scientific as possible in selection process.

What has been interesting is that the more the employers turn to psychometrics tests candidates are turning these tests into exams to be passed. Candidates have called us asking for coaching session on psychometric tests while some firms offer practice sessions for them.

The challenge for you as an employer then is to ensure that you get the right results from the tests rather than those that have been influence by a candidate who is keener to say what they hope you want to hear than being honest.

As a firm that uses psychometric tests in sales people selection we have learnt a few lessons that I’m happy to share.

A test is as good as what it seeks to measure. The user of psychometric test need to be clear what the test measures and whether what it measures is relevant to performance in the role. For example if a test measures whether someone is an introverted or extroverted you need to ask yourself whether these factors are essential for the role you are filling.

Secondly, you need to be sure that the test can validly pick out these factors. The simpler and straight forward a test is the more likely it is to be manipulated by the candidate. Great tests are expensive because they are costly to develop, administer, analyze and interpret. While there are many computerized systems to do the analysis in most cases the best interpretation is done by a human being.

Psychometric tests are great in giving an objective representation of a candidate. However, they should never be used alone to make a selection decision. No one can talk of a test that is 100% fool proof. But the administrator should have validated the test to a point where they can talk of their error margin and demonstrate whether that is acceptable. The conventional interviewing should seek to validate the outcomes of the psychometric tests.

When we test for various aspects of sales aptitude and sales behavior tendencies we use oral interview that is structured to validate the tests results. This greatly improves our success rate in hiring great candidates using these tests.

We have seen candidates who have all the right qualifications, credentials and demeanor come out weak in the tests. The decision then becomes whether to ignore the test results and go with the impressive resume. Some employers have opted for the resume. Most of them regret making this decision. Our suggestion then has been – ignore the test results only with good reasons.

Benefit from The Launch that Never Happened

When we printed The Guy Who Fired His Boss we had planned for a grand launch. We had planned to give away a hard back edition of the book. The launch never happened.

However, the hard back books were already printed and shipped into Kenya. These hard-back copies were not intended to be put in the market for sale but shared with special people. They will still not be put in the book stores because their price is a bit high and they wont sell given the price competition from the soft back edition.

But you can get a copy of this hardback edition from me. I need to create storage room in the house urgently. I'm therefore offering the hard-back edition of The Guy Who Fired His Boss for Kshs 1200 for 2 Copies ( In the market each copy would sell for Kshs 2300).

If you want to take advantage of this rare offer inbox me your interest and we will send the copies to you wherever you are in Kenya. or email kendi@growthpartners.co.ke/ +254 20 8012627

Is your Sales Force Prepared for the Tough Sales Battles?

You don’t send out an army for critical operation unless you are certain that the personnel are well equipped with motivation, skills and tools to do the job. Unfortunately many sales people sent out every day to generate and convert opportunities into sales are not equipped to do the basics of the job leave- alone achieving the targets given to them. Many of them have no idea of what they are expected to produce and a bigger population do not know how to deliver what their bosses demanding of them. 

At the end of every month, managers and sales people are frustrated with the numbers. As a result the following month starts with demands and threats from managers and promises from sales people which over time culminate with firing and resignations. 

New sales people and managers are hired and the cycle begins again. Deep down everyone hopes this is a different bunch but, at the end of it reality dawns that the business is stuck at the same point it was with last group of sales people. What is the solution to this vicious cycle?

You need to develop the capacity of your team to be equal to the task you expect them to perform. The bigger the tasks the bigger the capacity required to undertake it. To build this capacity, you need to develop the team by giving them the best training, coaching and motivation. 

Training gives people knowledge, skills and techniques to perform; coaching gets them to convert the knowledge into performance, behaviors and habits; and motivation is the fuel that gets the people to do it out of their own volition. Lack of any of these three aspects greatly lowers the capacity of the sales person to perform.

Growth Partners focuses on building ideas, solutions and products that address these three aspects in a sales person and team. We have training courses that fire up sales people into action and show them how to transform that effort into results. We have helped dozens of ordinary sales people transform into high producing sales professionals. We have also worked with tens of sales managers and organizations as they build an environment that allows and encourages sales talent to flourish. 

We have coached, guided and mentored individual sales people and their managers, as well as set-up strategies and structures that draw out the full of their potential.  We have helped many people discover their sales strengths and guided them on how to make these strengths work for them. We have assisted many firms discover where the main performance constraints are and walked with them as they focus on  addressing and removing these bottlenecks that stop them from becoming better organizations. 

We help sales directors and managers, sales people, business leaders and HR Managers through open and in-house training programs, sales growth strategy formulation and execution, coaching among other services designed to help you achieve your sales goals. 

Whatever sales challenge you are experiencing in your organization or career, plan to have a conversation with our sales consultant and see if we could help. Our passion is to see your problems solved.


Register now for the sales mastery course.