Identifying High Potential Diamonds

Can you spot a diamond in the rough? They exist inside every organization, but most managers fail to identify them. Meanwhile, research indicates these diamonds will never reach their potential because they are in the wrong job. Or worse still, they’re in the right job, inside your very own company, but are being mismanaged.

“If hiring managers are allowed to interview candidates who have an 80% to 90% job match, most performance and retention issues go away.”

Why are so many people in the wrong job?

- Experience and education do not a superior performer make. Yet, management bases their hiring decisions on education and experience. There is no research to support that hiring based on education or experience leads to successful job performance. If there was, then all educated and experienced people would be top performers.

- They were a perfect fit – for the job description, not the work. Hiring managers fail to understand the job. A job description does not provide a basis from which to interview and hire. Instead, the job must be defined by key accountabilities; usually not more than three to five for most jobs. Once these are identified, they provide a basis for specifying the knowledge, certifications, behavior, motivators, experience, personal skills and education required to fit the job.

- The hiring manager loved them. Hiring managers tend to hire with their heart, not their head. But they need to look for the chemistry between the person and the job, not the chemistry they feel toward the applicant.

Finding Diamonds

Finding those diamonds in the rough starts with clearly defining the job with key accountabilities. Once the job has been defined, a system to qualify and screen candidates can be established.

For more information on finding diamonds, contact Vantage for a demonstration of our benchmarking, leadership development and recruitment process.

What is Your Customer Experience Strategy?

Do you know what your differentiating factor is when it comes to customer loyalty? What is the deciding factor that makes them buy from you time and time again? Having good salespeople, outstanding discounts and unforgettable advertising are nice but what draws customers in?

The overall experience is what keeps customers loyal and continuing to darken the doorstep of your establishment. Having a strategy in place and empowering your employees to execute that strategy is of the utmost importance.

How do you stand out from the guy around the corner that offers the same products and services you do? Customer experiences, the value you bring to the transaction.

In "Customer Experience Strategy", Lior Arussy talks about three steps for keeping your customer experience strategy fresh, timely and effective.

Deliver: "Execute your customer experience strategy. How do you perform at the moment of truth? Do you succeed? If you fail, why? And what will you do differently? Compliant resolution will be a big component of this discussion."

Be proactive, Not reactive.

When you truly execute your customer experience strategy, you will find yourself in a proactive situation instead of a defensive reactive response pattern.  Customers will be spreading positive comments about your organization through word of mouth, social media and other likely outlets.   Having satisfied customers that sing your praises is the single best marketing advantage an organization can have in today’s marketplace.

The proactive approach allows for your message to be consistent and delivered with purpose.  It allows for a strategic viewpoint to the changes in the marketplace and therefore the changing demands of your customers.

"40% of loyal customers are willing to pay a premium of 10% 
or more when they receive great experiences."

But is it too late? If the customer has already complained in a public form like Twitter, Facebook or a blog...could it be too late to resolve the issue? According to companies like Southwest, Ikea and Boingo, it’s not.  All of these companies consistently reach out to unhappy customers via social media and offer to resolve the unpleasant experience. Nobody wants to be associated with a hashtag fail! That can haunt you on Twitter for years to come.  In other media outlets, taking a transparent and sincere approach with customers and employees is a win-win.

Measure: "Measure the progress and the impact of the customer experience strategy on loyalty. What are the right metrics not only for your organization as a whole, but also for departments and individuals? How do you determine which metrics to pay attention to? You’ll examine which metrics to ignore, and which to highlight, both internally and externally."

Customer care surveys are key! Companies like Old Navy, Wal-Mart and Ulta appreciate feedback so much that they offer discounts just for calling in or going online and answering a few questions as follow up for a recent trip to one of their retail locations.  Not only do they gather information on their products but they ask about location and staff as well.

Change with the times...AND your customers.

Redefine: "Continue an on-going reinvention process. How do you put continuing experience governance in place and make it effective? Changes in technology and in taste dictate a constantly evolving set of experiences to delight customers."

Redefining is pretty self explanatory, but think about it for just a minute.  How do companies stay successful and in the forefront of their industry? They evolve! They change! And so do your customers and what they want from each and every interaction with your company.

And now you might be wondering, is a customer experience strategy worth it? Absolutely!

What is your customer experience strategy?

For more information on gathering customer feedback on the experience you provide, your staff and your products, contact Vantage today about a Customer Care Survey today!

The Emotional State of Team Spirit

Every day, employees show up at your company in some kind of emotional state. They  may slide into their seats still humming a tune from the car radio, or they may walk in gnashing their teeth after a near disaster in traffic; but they show up feeling something, and so do you. Like them, you’ll need to be productive regardless of how you feel. And sometimes, that can be hard.

Imagine meeting a deadline so serious that it absolutely, positively has to happen today, or your company will suffer huge loses and you’ll lose your job—when you’ve just discovered that you’ve won your state’s million dollar lottery. Could you do it? How about making that crucial deadline if you just got a phone call that your latest health test results came back with very bad news? Think of the flood of emotion you would feel with either of these phone calls. How difficult would it be to focus on the business at hand?

Even at work, your coworkers, your direct reports and you experience a range of emotions from sadness to joy, from mild, momentary feelings to the ones with heart-pounding intensity. How they (and you) control your emotions to accomplish what needs to be done each day makes all the difference to your company’s performance.

In the past, concentrating on helping your team develop technical skills and doing some occasional team building was considered good, because that’s all that was available. But knowing what we now know about how emotional intelligence affects performance, that’s not enough.

The emerging science of emotional and social intelligence is defining the conditions that bring out people’s power to create and collaborate at work. When you’re a leader or manager at any level in your organization, it’s extremely important that you are able to control your own emotions and lead your employees to do so as well, so everyone on the team is able to come to work motivated and energized. If your company isn’t using knowledge of Emotional Quotient to build an emotionally intelligent, high performance culture, you can bet that the leading organizations in your industry are.  Their ability to keep innovating depends on it, and so does yours.

How does your organization look at the emotional side of your team? 

Groundbreaking Research: What’s Inside of Top Sales Performers in the United States and Europe

Research studies of top sales people in both the United States and Europe confirm that top sales performance can be predicted. The most successful organizations in the world already know that hiring the right people has the potential of becoming the most powerful “secret weapon” in their arsenal of competitive strategies. What they don’t know is that hiring the right sales people can be as simple as following a recipe based on recent findings from an international study conducted by Frank Scheelen of The Scheelen Institut, Waldshut-Tiengen, Germany and, Bill J. Bonnstetter of Target Training International, Ltd. in Scottsdale, Arizona.

As a result of their twenty years of research, development and distribution of assessment tools to measure performance, they have been telling organizations that it is what’s on the inside, not the outside, that counts, especially in sales performance. What the research is fighting is the myth that hiring people who look and sound good leads to good performance. As global competition forces organizations to greater heights in key performance arenas such as customer service, quality and customization, aggressive organizations must be ever vigilant in the identification, acquisition, development and integration of innovative technology. This type of innovative technology is now available from Vantage for top performers, using Talent Management Plus assessments.

Much of the research conducted in the past on top salespeople has been focused on behavior. Behavioral research has been popular because, like looking good and sounding good, behavior can be observed. Little, if any significant study has been focused on what goes on inside a top salesperson. This groundbreaking research in the United States and Europe now confirms that attitudes far outweigh looking good, sounding good or behavior in distinguishing top salespeople. Two of the most significant assumptions were confirmed by the two studies. (1) Top performing salespeople around the world are similar and, (2) Attitudes or values are more important than behavior in sales performance.

In both studies, only top performing salespeople responded. In the United States study and a separate German study, top performing salespeople responded to two of TTI’s internationally validated assessments. One was based on the DISC behavioral model and the other was based on the Personal Interests, Attitudes and Values model.

Note that in the United States study, 178 top sales performers tended to be spread across four behavioral dimensions. In the German study, top sales performers tended to be spread across the same four behavioral dimensions. In view of these results, it is reasonable to conclude that salespeople can sell in most, if not all, behavioral dimensions.

However, when it comes to what is on the inside of top performing salespeople, both the United States study as well as the German study confirm it is hands-down, a Utilitarian Attitude. In the U.S., 72% had Utilitarian as their top value.  In Germany, 71% had the same Utilitarian value as their number one value.  Every study conducted in the last 30 years confirms the importance of a Utilitarian attitude in superior performance in sales.

For more information about this study, and assessments available for hiring sales professionals, contact Vantage.

Are you wasting your resources?

No one intentionally wastes their own time, money or opportunities. Yet it’s common knowledge that a lot of new gym memberships will languish unused, despite the spectacular success stories of those who make good use of them. For many people, good intentions are overwhelmed in the day-to-day flow of activities and information, and the result is that something with a tremendous potential for success gets lost in the shuffle.

We would never willingly let this happen in our business. But we know that from social networking options and innovative technology products to the latest marketing tools, somewhere in the flow of new information we encounter every day there are great business ideas that we could be taking advantage of. Sooner or later, we’ll read that they were the key to a business success, and we’d prefer that the success be in our business.

The resource that could be the key to a new growth phase for your business may have already crossed your radar recently. When you think about increasing productivity and profits in the coming year, consider the resources you have access to but haven’t taken advantage of yet. Are there products and services that you’ve been telling yourself you will investigate further when you have time? A terrific opportunity for building your business may be waiting for your attention.

If you have a good working relationship with someone who has been suggesting that you consider a new product or service, it’s time to follow up. Your prospects for the coming year go up exponentially when you build on previous successes and relationships of trust.

"If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astonish ourselves."
Thomas Edison

People—whether they are the hidden talents of those already in your ranks or the ones you have yet to hire—are at the top of the list of resources you can’t afford to miss out on. When you make the most of the resources you’ve got, you make this a stand out year for your organization.
 
Identify the best opportunities for your business with the help of a trusted Vantage Associate who can bring expertise to bear on your company’s specific needs.