Managing a Virtual Team - Telephone Sales Training

Many of us have to manage people we don't physically work with on a regular basis. Sales managers have long faced the challenge of managing people on the road – for others the challenge may be newer. So what can you do to help yourself

Be a better manager to a virtual team

First of all, clarify what kind of virtual team you are dealing with.

Are your team working on projects together, or do they work individually and are a team simply because they all report to you?

• If the team are actually working together, though sitting apart, you will need to devote a lot of your people management time to making the joint process, telephone sales training as effective as possible. This may mean conference calls, regular get-togethers, and lots of cross team networking.

• If the projects are mostly individual, then the team will need more one to one support from you, and ‘team time' can be focused on exchanging relevant information, building customer service skills and offering customer support.

Relationship Insight

The less time you are able to spend with someone who works for you, the more important it is to have a useful, reliable insight into their working style, their motivational needs and their core values. Understanding yourself and your management development training style will also help you adapt to each individual's needs.

Applying your Insight

Of course, it is no use understanding how to get the most from people if you don't apply your knowledge in practice. Language really matters when dealing with people on the phone. Use the wrong words, and you will not get the reaction you seek.

For example,

If you ask someone with a high activist learning style to ‘spend a couple of hours thinking about possible approaches to a problem' you are not likely to get very much in return.

Ask the same person to ‘identify 3 ways that we could deal with this problem, with a short action plan for each that you would be prepared to implement' and you may get just the quality of thinking you need.

Choose your communication methods carefully

Applying your insight into people to choosing appropriate communication methods will help you make the best use of all the options

• Try to avoid using personal meetings for routine administration and information.
• If the team is meeting altogether, spend time talking to each person beforehand to establish what they want from the group meeting, and to clear any routine items beforehand

• Feedback by e-mail is always risky! Even if you have something positive to say, it can be taken in the wrong way (eg. You write ‘well done – a really good piece of work!' and they think ‘did she think I wasn't capable of doing a good job!').

• If you need to use the phone to give feedback, and the impact of having a virtual team is that usually you will – choose your words very carefully. E.g. telling someone who is very goal

oriented that an action was ‘not helpful' will have minimal impact, since their aim is to deliver goals not be helpful. Suggesting that a different approach would make the achievement of the goal much more likely will have a greater chance of encouraging this person to change behaviour.

• Remember that when you can't soften what you say through body language, criticism will sound much harsher than you perhaps mean.

• If the person receiving feedback is completely on their own – perhaps working from home or on the road, you need to be especially careful not to leave the individual feeling massively de-motivated. Again, a good understanding of their personal motivations and values will guide you on a suitable approach.

TIME for preparation as well as meeting

• When using the phone for meetings, allow a lot of time to prepare carefully.

• If you want people to contribute to a phone meeting, discuss beforehand how you would like them to contribute and when.

• Plan the meeting in key sections so that you can change the pace and vary the style. You might want to include a round the group update session, some brainstorming, an overview of a specific project or issue, a short skills piece and clear next actions.

3 Skills of a Confident Senior Manager

To rise to the top of your organisation whether you are in HR, sales, marketing or operations you will need to be confident when talking to the board. Where does that confidence come from?

The 3 critical components of confident Senior Managers

1. Functional expertise

You may have a broad general experience, but you should expect to be highly competent in the function that you are leading. Competence means knowing your limits, knowing what you do and don't know and knowing where to find the specialist expertise you need to support you.

2. Financial Acumen

Every senior manager needs to be able to make sense of both the company internal management accounts and the published financial accounts. You need to know where your activity shows up in the accounts and what you can do that will influence the numbers. Financial acumen is as critical for public sector managers as it is for private sector. Indeed, for public sector where income may be fixed, understanding how you influence the outgoing numbers is even more important, no matter what your specialist expertise.

3. Business or Organisational Knowledge

You need to know your business or organisation very well, and how it relates to others in the same market or sector. All businesses are not the same, and understanding what it is that your business does to make money is critical. If you are in the public sector the same rules apply – Hospital A is not like Hospital B, and no amount of government intervention will give you the same catchment with the same workforce in the same environment.

One is not enough

You may well have been promoted or recruited to a senior role on the basis of just one of these components. The most common basis for appointment is functional expertise. Ironically in senior management this may be the least use on a daily basis. To be successful, and help your organisation succeed you need all three. So what can you do?

1. Functional expertise

* Keep up to date
* If you have moved into a new field, find the experts inside and outside quickly, get a crash course from them through conversations and recommended reading
* A high level conference or seminar will give you the main drivers
* ‘Introduction to training courses may not help – they are often very tactical and aimed at junior employees

2. Financial Acumen

* Aim for understanding not detailed execution
* Ask the Finance Director or senior financial controller to take you through the company and management accounts in detail
* Accountants measure intangible assets (the ones you can't touch) all the time – ask how to measure any intangible benefits you think your team brings
* Ask yourself how much financial value your team is contributing – ask the finance team how it could be measured
* Build a picture for yourself of how your organisation uses its money – reflect on how it could better use its money to meet its goals
* Introduction to Finance courses may be very useful

3. Organisational Knowledge

* If you have been brought in from outside, understanding what makes the organisation tick should be very high on your list
* Meet with your peer group managers on an individual and group basis often - don't let this get pushed out by your functional role
* Identify the informal influencers as quickly as you can and get to know them
* Think of the key things you need to know to be effective, and formulate your questions before you meet people
* If you are in a new sector, senior level seminars and conferences could give you a quick overview of the key sector drivers
* If you are an internal promotion, make sure you don't lose touch with the ‘grass roots' – you still have to get things done!

Can you value leadership training?

A major debate has been sparked by severe criticism in Personnel Today of the BBC's Leadership Training Programme. An external consultant has declared there is no measurable Return on Investment in training programme, and as such it is a waste of public funds. So …..

Can You Value Leadership Training?

In simple terms, as soon as you have agreed a budget for any training programme design, you have placed what you expect will be the minimum value of the programme to your organisation.

You have clearly made some value judgements, so a great place to start would be to examine those judgements in more detail. Ask yourself the following…

How did you select this programme over other programmes on offer?

What value did you place in relative terms between the style and content of this programme and others?

Did you define the content before choosing a programme?

How was the content defined – who declared a need or objective?

Did you define outcomes and then seek a provider to design content?

Who defined the outcomes, and how?

How did you select a provider – how has this provider won your confidence?

How have you decided who will take part in the programme?

Are participants under-performers, or high flyers being groomed for succession?

Is the programme part of planned career development, or intended to raise morale in the short term?

Are you seeking a powerful way to retain staff, or needing to raise the skills of an entire team to take on a new challenge?

As you start to answer these questions, you will be examining what it is that is being valued. It can be a challenging process. If your answers are along the lines of ‘because that's the way it's always been done' or simply ‘don't know' then it may well be that some training programmes have little or no value.

If you can start to get useful answers to these questions, you have the basis for turning the broad value decisions into financial values. Imperfectly maybe, but in a sufficiently practical way to add value to your decision making, and justification for training programmes.

Managing Your Boss

Your boss often has more impact on your life than your colleagues, your team or even your family. It's a cliché that people join a company - but leave a manager. If you have a good working relationship with your manager you will know how that can help make even a tough job enjoyable. If you and your boss don't get on so well – here are some tips for…

4 If your boss ‘dumps' on you

You and your boss may have a communication problem, or you may have a boss that does not know how to delegate effectively. A substantial proportion of senior managers in the UK have had little or no management development training! Ask your boss for time to set SMART goals for tasks or projects that have been ‘dumped' on you. This will help both of you understand the implications of what is expected of you.

5 If your boss is always interfering

This boss asks you to do something, and then won't leave you alone to get on with it. It can be very hard for managers to ‘let something go' that they are used to doing themselves. The best way to prevent this is once again to set some specific SMART goals relating to your work and agreeing report back times. It's then easier for you to gently push back on any interference by saying that everything is on schedule and you will report as agreed.

It is critical of course that you let this boss know if you need help in anyway. If you don't deliver on something, you will find your boss interfering even more in future.

6 You just don't get on

If you really don't get on, you both need to find a way to develop an acceptable working relationship. This will reduce stress for the two of you. One way of minimizing conflict is to accept that you have different working styles and then to develop an agreed routine. It may be helpful to use a facilitator to help to do this. Remember that bosses can be very touchy about such a process, seeing it as an implied criticism. Find an assertiveness programme or coach to help you get started.

Make Time For Planning

The new business year is already in full swing and there is a lot to achieve before summer comes. We all know that it’s all too easy to rush into every activity with a determination to get it done and then move onto the next one. However, take a pause for a moment and…

Make Time for Planning

Organisational life can make us very busy achieving not enough. We can’t work much faster, and it’s not always clear what working smarter means. Here are some quick tips to make sure all of your efforts actually pay off this year.

Allocate 10-20 minutes of planning time every day

Planning is an everyday job, not a twice yearly binge. This means thinking about the big picture every day. Ask these questions:
What are you aiming for?
Where are you getting results?
What is going on around you that might have a major impact (positive or negative)? And finally,What actions do you need to take and when?
Try not to spend more than 20 minutes on planning. If you do it every day this will be sufficient and you will continually move forward.

Every day do one thing to move you forward strategically. It might be a phone call or an e-mail. It may be a major conference or an important one to one meeting with one of your team. The point is not how long you spend on planning in any one day, but that every day you do something.

Plan your goals into your diary first

Part of your individual planning will produce action plans for how to deliver your goals, both personal and professional. Plan time as far ahead as possible in your diary to ensure that actions are completed.

Organisational planning can be done in this way too

Sometimes, you do have to get together with your team for marathon planning sessions. However, much organisational planning can be done in shorter daily, weekly or monthly bursts (perhaps via conference calls rather than through extended meetings). Keep most of your team and department planning processes as simple as possible. You will get better quality plans if they are put together transparently, so that everyone can see the big picture as early in the process as possible.

Keep plans in view

So many plans are made and then kept in a drawer or in an electronic file. If you want your team to follow the plan, have it on the wall and ask people to plot their progress. If you don’t want your personal plan on the wall for public view, set it to pop up on your screen every day.

How do you value Customer Service?

Ideas for creating clarity at work

As you face a New Year, it is probable that your organisation will be thinking about Customer Service in some way. Whatever your challenges with Customer Service Skills - launching, improving, changing, cost cutting, off-shoring – if you don't know what Customer Service Training is worth to the business, its near impossible to make the best response to the challenge. So…

How do you Value Customer Service?

As you may imagine, for a large service based organisation, valuing Customer Service Skills is a major challenge. If you are not financially minded, it can be a daunting prospect.

A practical approach to valuing Customer Service:

The first stage is to identify the importance of Customer Service to the business or business unit. It is usual to involve Marketing, Sales and Finance in this process, as well as the Customer Service team.

When estimating the importance of Customer Service there are 2 founding principles:

HATS Principle 1

Customer Service must have SOME value (i.e. it is not worth nothing). If Customer Service has no value, the organisation should not be providing it.

HATS Principle 2

It is unlikely that Customer Service represents the TOTAL value of the organisation. Every organisation has additional resource such as knowledge, process, or environment as part of its customer offer.

From these two principles, it is clear that Customer Service represents between 0 and 100% of the VALUE of the business.

These principles apply whether the organisation is public or private, large or small.

For many organisations, taking on board these two principles provides a major shift in thinking. So that if, for example, your contact centre is treated purely as a cost to the business, it is unlikely that the best investment decisions about its development will be made.

The next stage is to estimate, from the Customers Perspective , what is the VALUE of the Customer Service your organisation provides as a proportion of the total customer spend? Once again you will need to involve at least Sales and Marketing in the process as well as the Customer Service team. Remember that the VALUE of Customer Service may be unrelated to the COST.

At this point you will have to start segmenting your customer base. Some will value Customer Service much more than others. You may be able to segment your customer base by the products they buy, but where you offer a uniform product, for example, utilities or public sector services, you will need to use customer satisfaction surveys and market research to help you.

Is Management Development risky?

Developing your management team, from the front line through to the CEO is supposed to be essential for success. And indeed it is. I would find it hard to name a successful company employing more than 10 people where the leaders haven't had some kind of management training. And yet, such training can often go wrong. So .......

Reduce the risk of management development

Here are some of your key risks, all of which we have seen in the last 12 months in more than one organisation. Plus a few hints on how to mitigate the risk.

1. People receive management development but are not offered a management role

What happens - such people become de-motivated and possibly leave.

If people seek management roles and there aren't going to be any in the foreseeable future it is best to be honest. Management development is not an alternative to promotion, it is preparation for it. If someone seems unsuited for management, only the most sophisticated in depth programmes are likely to change that. If management is the only way to advance in your organisation, you may be losing your best people to roles they are ill suited for. This is a well known phenomenon in Sales, but actually happens in many functions.

TIP: Review development options, and aim to offer professional development where managerial options are not appropriate.

2. The management development programme is based on a completely different management style to the one currently operating in the organisation

What happens – the programme becomes discredited, and/or the trainees become discouraged and de- motivated when they cannot apply their new learning in practice.

If for example, your organisation runs on highly structured reporting lines, with closely defined areas of activity, a management programme that seeks to introduce cross functional working and networked structures will fail. To make such changes in management style is a major undertaking, where development programmes are just one piece of a much bigger programme.

TIP: Ensure that your management development programmes are aligned in style and structure to your organisational culture. It's not just the content. Ensure individuals delivering the programme take the time to really understand the context of the organisation.

3. Delegates attempts to introduce new ideas (for example SMART objectives) are interpreted by the workforce as a change to terms and conditions

What happens – in the worst case there has been industrial action.

All development happens in context. If the programme fails to acknowledge the culture and conditions of the workforce, there is a high risk that new learning could trigger problems. Flexible organisations aren't risk free either, there are always individuals who will resist the attempt of managers to introduce new ideas they perceive as less favourable .