How We Are Different
The author is the instructor – most training companies leverage their content by hiring professional trainers who know the training content but perhaps not much about their client’s business. Bob Potter customizes and conducts all of his own training. He is not only the author of the books and the designer of the training, he also served in senior roles of his target audiences (investment banking, professional services, consulting, commercial real estate) so he has the credibility and capability to work with your top producers.
We teach you how to win, not just how to sell – Most client acquisition training programs teach you how to sell your services, but not how to win. They teach you how to ask questions, uncover needs and then position your service as a solution. But what happens when the client has already decided to use the services that you offer, and now they are just deciding between you and your best competitors? How do clients choose, and how do providers win “bake offs?” The Third Level Series picks up where most training stops – How to win in competition. There is a clear pattern to how clients chose and how elite providers align and win.
We teach your top people first – First, we teach your top producers how to take their game to the next level. That’s because you get a much better return (10 times better!) sooner by investing limited training dollars in your top producers. Most training dollars are spent on mid to low level people. The objective is to get them to perform more like your top producers. Little or no money is spent on training the top people because they are already very good, or so the thinking goes. However, it is your top people who are fighting the biggest battles. In business there is no prize money when you finish second. All of the spoils go to the winner. What would it mean to your organization if each of your top people won one more “bake off” this year? The penetration of the training goes wider and deeper. Once we have buy in of your top people, lower level participants are more highly motivated to participate.
Outcome Based Instructional Design vs. Content – Most training fails because it is content driven. But content without outcome is at best entertainment. Would you ask you child to learn the piano by reading a book? Client acquisition and retention is a highly complex skill that is not mastered in a day or two of training. Research shows that most accomplished people need around 10 years of hard work before becoming world class, a pattern so well established researchers call it “the 10-year rule.” Further, the best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice” – “activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.” Our courseware is outcome driven (vs. content or activity driven) that allows participants to continually coach themselves (Deliberate Practice) over time. That leads to much greater sustainability in learning.
Sustainability vs. “Fire hose” – Let’s say you were a professional baseball coach, and one of your best players was not taking batting practice. You asked him why and he said, “I took batting practice five years ago.” You probably would not react well because you know that the difference between an average batter and a hall of famer is only one hit every two weeks. Yet that is often how we view training: “I took sales training five years ago.” To be successful skills training must be sustainable. That is why we not only design our training to be outcome oriented so participants can coach themselves, we also reinforce training with Webinars, self paced elearning, and Coach the Coaches training.
