Ask any number of truly successful leaders of today and they will tell you, their success does not come from marking time. They are always in motion – thinking, doing, and leading change for their organizations, their teams and themselves. At the forefront of a successful business leader’s efforts are their company’s vision and acute awareness of how their actions affect that vision.

If you are looking to improve your change leadership skills, perhaps it’s time to get your act together!

Begin by making a regular habit of assessing your own act(ions); take a close look at a day/week/month in the life of you!  Make a list of specific actions you have taken that support the vision. Then, bring it into focus – analyze your list to determine:

- What gaps are evident?

- What actions have I taken (will I take) to close those gaps?

- What areas warrant more focus?

- Who can I turn to?  – What actions do I perform/oversee regularly can be delegated and to whom can they be assigned?

-Which actions prove strongest in moving our vision forward?

-Where is the proof that these actions have impact?

-What benefits (or setbacks) have been (will be) realized as a result of these actions?

-How will I hold myself accountable?

Be agile, use this exercise to stay ahead of the flow – adapt the plans and strategies that keep you and your team moving toward the vision.

Lynda Fleming – Director of Learning & Development, Frontline Performance Group

Successful business strategies are the backbone of thriving businesses and highly successful business people. Here are 10 random, yet essential business takeaways that have me thinking as we approach our 18th year in business and I reflect on this past year.

• Nothing is more powerful than what you can CONTROL in your business. Take inventory of what those ”controllables” are and focus on executing them to the fullest in the New Year.
• Nothing is more frustrating than what you can’t CONTROL in your business. Always work on making that list smaller.
• Your existing customer is always your best one! Take incredibly good care of them.
• In every situation, every challenge and opportunity, look for the win-win … there is always one there.
• A strong ego is a great driver for success. A big ego is the inevitable downfall of so many business leaders.
• Always have an open mind and listen to varying opinions, then distill them to come up with the best solution that fits your needs.
• Capitalize on your strengths and what you like and do best. Do the same with those around you.
• Fully develop and execute the 3 drivers of team performance; compensation, recognition, and accountability.
• An effective “sales engine” in your business is incredibly hopeful and rewarding. Focus on putting it in overdrive in 2011.
• Thinking in terms of logic and common sense always makes the most sense! Always consider things from the other point of view. Accept that for things to work over a period of time they have to always add up and make sense.

As you ponder these points I think you will agree, you don’t have to be a business owner to adopt them as principles. In fact, embracing these strategies is among the best ways to catapult your career in your own business or the business you work in. They will help you capitalize on the outstanding opportunities that exist today and pave the way for a most successful future.

Ziad Khoury – Founder and President, Frontline Performance Group

Dr. Paul Hersey said that “Effective leadership is not ‘different strokes for different folks.’ It’s different strokes for the same folks, depending on their level of readiness for specific tasks.” Have you ever heard a sales manager say something like, “Well this is how I manage and that’s the way it is”? Sometimes, the good intention of working harder, not smarter, has the unintended consequence for managers of their team not meeting goals or at least not maximizing the potential they have to succeed.

The challenge with this line of thinking is that one-size-fits-all management fits no one well and everyone poorly. If a salesperson is great at greeting and building rapport but needs work on probing questions, the style of management or influence needs to be different when addressing them as they are clearly two very distinct areas. When a salesperson, whether frontline or executive level, is treated with a one-way type of direction and is micromanaged for a task in which they already excel, it creates disdain and apathy for both the task and the manager.  A more effective approach is to define the salesperson’s current level of performance for every task of their job and then exert influence around that task with the leader behavior they need, not what they necessarily want.  Inspired performance (meaning that your team is committed and not just compliant), comes from understanding what your people need and providing it for them. 

Here are five tips for defining the performance level of your salespeople and giving them what they need for specific tasks …

1.  Understand the task itself. What kinds of traits are needed and what is the process that will make this task successful?

2.  Define if the salesperson has the ability to do the task and if they are motivated to do it. Sometimes people have neither the ability nor the motivation to do a task. Take new salespeople for example, typically, they have great motivation but lack the ability to perform a task.  Others have the ability but just plain don’t want to do it and a superstar is likely to do the task incredibly well and will love doing it.  Each calls for a different management intervention.

3.  Once you know where a salesperson is with a certain task, define what they need from you. For example, a salesperson with very little ability is going to need a lot of direction – not yelling or condescending, just good, strong explanation and guidance.  The more ability they have, the less direction they need. Those with very low motivation, depending on how much ability they have, may need strong direction.  If they are highly skilled, just a chance to “vent” may be the answer; in which case, you as the manager become a “facilitator”, not a “dictator”.  In the case of a person who is really good at a task and enjoys doing it, they don’t need much of your time – just acknowledgement and an occasional “check-in”.

4.  Understand that as with all people, a salesperson’s performance may change over time due to a variety of factors, some personal and some professional. Just because they have done a great job in the past, it does not mean they are still performing the same task at the same high level.  If this is the case, analyze their new performance level and react accordingly.

5.  Practice your ability to analyze and diagnose the performance level of your team for various tasks; then work on adjusting your behavioral management style.  Your influence style should be based on the analysis of current need for a specific task.

Remember, if you are one of those managers who is of the belief that, “This is the way I manage and that’s it”, you will only maximize your potential 25% of the time.  Why not learn to understand what your sales team needs and then exceed beyond, best performance 100% of the time?

Michael Stahl - Senior Performance Manager, Frontline Performance Group  

I often see high-level managers and business owners express an almost irrational fixation on a singular internal metric or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Their steadfast focus, while admirable, is often shockingly misguided and harmful to the business. This owner intensity typically drives the organization to dramatically improve one specific metric while ignoring others, which frequently results in business trauma, unintended consequences and collateral damage.

One organization I recently worked with focused all of their attention, compensation and recognition on their top volume revenue producers. They characterized these agents as ”top performers” and rewarded them as such. Upon closer inspection, however, the agents who had produced the most revenue were not the best salespeople. They were simply “churning” calls and skimming opportunities rapidly for the easiest sales. This “cherry-picking” does produce large revenues; however, it does so at the expense of more needy customers who require greater attention and patience. Once conversion of opportunities handled and a customer service index were added as performance indicators, many of the perceived top agents fell significantly in the rankings. Although they were producing large revenue sums, the hidden collateral damage they were doing to the brand through their insensitivity to other customers largely outweighed the positive sales results they were generating. This situation is tragic…and common. Conversely, with the new performance indicators in place the true capabilities and contributions of some of the near-top and average agents were seen for the first time.

In one industry, an owner might place all of his focus on sales revenue only to get burned by profit slippage from excessive agent-to-customer incentives or discounts, or on the back-end through poor quality sales resulting in high accounts receivable defaults. In another scenario, an owner may become fixated on utilization percentage (as in car rental or hotel room usage) while simultaneously neglecting to see the harsh effect of the lower daily rates needed to drive that utilization. If you had a four room hotel, would you rather have 100% occupancy at $100 per room night or 80% occupancy at $150 per room night? The first example produces a Revenue Per Unit of $100 while the less-used property produces a Revenue Per Unit of $120 — a 20% revenue premium for less work! Factor in the reduced labor needed to handle the lower number of transactions along with the reduced product cost, and you see a new perspective surface. In yet another case, transactions produced per hour may be the driving force while little or no consideration is placed on the profit or brand-building potential of those transactions to the organization.

All of these metrics, along with many others, are worthwhile and critical to your success. However, it is important to remember more often than not it is the calibration of several Key Performance Indicators that will ultimately drive the two metrics that matter most, long-term customer care and profit.

Chris Brown- Senior Vice President, Frontline Performance Group

Most companies have four to six customer touch points and related sales opportunities.

If you map out all of your customer contact points, you will find that many of them present substantial revenue opportunities, and all of them provide significant service improvement opportunities.

Look at each of your customer contact points and figure out what influence your frontline can have through them.