LSA Global Insights Newsletter: 2007

December 1, 2007

Coaching for Sales Performance

Did you know that effective sales leadership training can create a competitive advantage that greatly impacts revenue growth, sales retention, and client satisfaction?

Sales leadership training can create effective sales managers and eliminate a long- term problem for many organizations. Promoting highly effective salespeople to the role of sales manager seems to fail as often as it succeeds, and there is little documented evidence of sales managers' independent contribution to organizational value.

Our research shows a 29% increase in top-line performance due to some critical few skills of sales managers independent of the skills of their salespeople.

Learn more about how to use Sales Management as a source of competitive advantage...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

How to Manage Top Sales People

Did you know that effective sales leadership training can create a competitive advantage that greatly impacts revenue growth, sales retention, and client satistaction?

Creating effective sales managers has been a long-term problem for many organizations. Promoting highly effective salespeople to the role of sales manager seems to fail as often as it succeeds, and there is little documented evidence of sales managers' independent contribution to organizational value.

Our research shows a 29% increase in top-line performance due to some critical few skills of sales managers independent of the skills of their salespeople.

Learn more about how to use Sales Management as a source of competitive advantage...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

November 1, 2007

Powerful Project Management Post Mortems

Research suggests that up to 75% of projects fail to meet original expectations or success criteria. In our minds, this number is unacceptable.

Each year, we conduct project post mortems with experienced, qualified, and motivated project teams that did not succeed. Our experience shows that spending a little bit of time to take stock throughout the project and at the end of a project can pay big dividends.

Post mortems also help ensure that you do not build irreversible walls between stakeholders, developers, departments, and team members.

If you are not making major improvements in cost, quality, stakeholder satisfaction, and time between projects, then our Post Mortem Methodology is for you.

Learn more about how to use Post Mortems to drive success...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

How to Manage Stakeholder Risk on Projects

Would it surprise you to learn that being on time, on budget, and fulfilling all requirements does not necessarily mean project success? Whose requirements are we trying to meet anyway? And who decides if the original due date can be changed when the scope grows?

The key to many complex projects is optimizing stakeholder involvement in a way that makes sense.

When it comes to stakeholders, you better be asking yourself the following 3 questions:

Who cares?
What do they care about?
What am I going to do about it?

To most good project leaders, these questions are pretty elementary. Here's the twist. As we developed a workshop on stakeholder management built on those three questions, one of our project risk management experts put all the pieces together when he said, "That's just risk management for people."

We think he's right. Read how to effectively manage stakeholder risk...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

October 1, 2007

Truly Managing Performance

Performance Management is a hot and confusing topic these days.

First of all, the term has different meanings for different people.

Secondly, business leaders who plan to introduce a Performance Management initiative have a variety of important concerns that they are trying to address:

Inability to execute key strategic goals.
Need to reduce overall costs and increase productivity.
Retention of top performers in key positions.
Lack of bench strength and succession risk.
Desire to formalize and actively develop cultural philosophies and values.

Just as concerns vary, so do Performance Management implementation strategies, practices, and tools. Whether the initiative is focused on aligning goals, integrating systems, or performance coaching, the underlying objective is to positively influence and align individual performance. Yet, most PM initiatives are still founded on the initial premises and assumptions of traditional Performance Management approaches.

Learn more about how to manage performance...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

5 Keys to Successful Performance Management

If you want better performance from your employees, the following four statements may surprise you:

Forget about making managers' lives easier.
Dump your performance appraisal and "coach" moniker.
Shift accountability away from employees.
Stop paying them off.

While these statements may seem to contradict what you have heard about successful performance management practices, we have found that the following five practices break away from conventional thinking to help solve the age old problem of the cumbersome, ineffective, and often ridiculed performance management practices.

Read the 5 Keys to Performance Management...

About LSA Global

Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

September 1, 2007

How to Sell to Executives

Are you having difficulty accessing and influencing key client executives to increase revenue?

Before executives or senior managers approve a purchase decision, they need to see how the product or service will impact their key corporate goals.

Sales industry leadership and true differentiation requires (1) Product and service knowledge, (2) Consultative selling skills, and (3) Applied business acumen.

Solution selling training is the key to succeeding with executives, you must address both current technical needs and strategic business needs - the critical needs that keep executives awake at night.

Learn more about how to sell higher ...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Upgrading Your Sales Force

Business sales training can help you to increase revenue, margins, and personal success by turning more of your "B" Players into "A" players?

Typically A players represent the top 10 to 15% of your sales force. Giving you're A and B players the tools to uncover complex business issues that are relevant to their customers and the skills to be able to link their solutions to those issues is the key to upgrading your sales force.

The results will reveal themselves in the numbers. When it comes to investing in your sales force the greatest return comes from concentrating on both your A and B players. First, provide your A players with...

About LSA Global

August 1, 2007

Project Management Diagnostic Tool

Would you like to work on improving project management skills to start off on the right foot, continuously improve, or support some key decisions?
Our experience and research tell us that up to 75% of projects fail to meet original expectations due to at least one of the following 5 key problems:

Lack of commitment.
Inability to define project scope and manage change.
Lack of resources.
Unrealistic schedules.
Poor definition and planning.

The LSA Project Management Best Practices Diagnostic Tool is based upon multi-industry project best practices and research. The results, combined with face-to-face interviews, are used to develop a targeted Project Results Blue Print to concretely define the action steps necessary to meet your goals.

#1 Reason Executives Believe Training Fails

When we talk to HR and training, they consistently tell us that learning initiatives such as sales negotiation training, performance management training or any other type of training fail for one of three reasons. Business executives tell us that all three assumptions are incorrect.

Do any of these actual quotes from HR and training clients sound familiar?

People do not have the time to attend training.
We do not have enough executive support or budget to do this right.
We need to do a better job marketing what we are offering to employees so we can fill these classes.

These unfortunately common statements reflect the #1 reason that business unit executives, line and new managers believe that training initiatives fail...

About LSA Global

July 1, 2007

5 Key Succession Planning Trends

Did you know that "talent mobility" is increasing as fast, if not faster than the performance management expectations of most companies?

While the majority of companies with more than 500 employees have already taken some steps to begin a succession planning process for senior management positions, most agree that they do not have the right "talent ready at the right time.

One of the key goals of any succession planning effort should be that there is no "hiccup" in seamlessly executing the business plan, at least from a talent and employee retention perspective.

To ensure success, we recommend implementing 5 key lessons learned from the field.

June 1, 2007

Channel Objectives, Metrics, and Dashboards

More and more organizations are finding that their Channels are not living up to their original performance expectations.

Channels are a complicated business, filled with nuance, complications, and outright complexity. What works in one situation might be counterproductive in another.

As a result, an important job for a channel leader or manager is to evaluate, adapt, and execute within a flexible framework that allows alignment across multiple objectives and metrics.

May 1, 2007

5 Project Success Factors

While almost every industry and profession continue to commit a greater proportion of their time and resources to key projects, up to 75% of their mission critical projects continue to fail to meet original expectations.

Few projects are easy. Even when the technology is proven, the requirements are clear, and the budget is sufficient, for various reasons, problems arise and project risk factors are not properly managed.

While many projects fail, others exceed or meet expectations.

If you have led or been involved with projects, you know that you must start with agreed upon goals and key stakeholders.

Read about the 5 Keys to Project Success...

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a leading performance consulting and training firm that helps high growth technology, services, and life-science companies create a competitive advantage by powerfully aligning their culture and talent with their strategy. Learn more about getting aligned

Project Management Tools & Templates

Are you looking to save time, reduce costs or improve project quality?

Best Practice templates, applied correctly, can greatly increase your chances for success by providing guidance, a common language, and proven concepts to integrate into your project.

With over 15 years of project management experience with leading organizations around the world, these templates were created by PMI certified PMP experts to help project teams improve the project skills needed to succeed.

Get Project Management Best Practice Templates...

About LSA Global

April 1, 2007

Does Your Interviewing Process Work?

In a previous issue of the Harvard Business Review, Larry Bossidy, the past CEO of AlliedSignal, describes interviewing as "the most flawed process in American business."

Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we couldn't agree more.

More and more of our clients have increased hiring. More and more of our clients utilize an inconsistent and unproven interviewing process that takes too much time and does not produce the desired results.

While we know that hiring the right people significantly decreases costs and increases productivity, fewer and fewer organizations have the skills to interview effectively-they don't have a clear picture of the ideal candidate nor how to ask the questions that will predict performance once hired.

We think the problem is obvious.

About LSA Global

Management Tools for Hiring Top Talent

If you are working long hours while trying to add important members to your team, you should be asking yourself lots of questions.

Based on over 25 years of experience helping organizations improve competency-based behavioral interviewing training and practices, we suspected you might be wondering how best to accomplish this objective.

Despite the best intentions, 90% of all terminations are due to performance factors that never appeared on a resume. Most companies exert 2-4 times more time and effort to interview and select new employees than is required.

It is possible to hire "A" players faster with less effort.