Before we completely turn the page and allow last week’s Thanksgiving holiday to pass us by, I wanted to take a moment to thank every one of you who have done your very best to truly focus on what you have been most grateful for this past year.

You may not think it matters, but I can assure you that your sense of gratitude and appreciation never goes unnoticed.

And as we roll into the new year, I firmly believe that it is our gratitude and appreciation for the three C’s that may still be ahead of us —

Challenges, Chaos, and Confusion —

That will make the difference. I know that these don’t sound like “Winning Words,” but they are, and let me explain and why I see them as game-changers.

If we had to list all the challenges or difficulties that we have witnessed or that we are experiencing personally, we would have a very lengthy list. Collectively the list would seem insurmountable. So why would I intimate that a challenge is something we should be grateful for? It’s because in every challenge we see someone who emerges and goes out of their way to help someone else. We see people sharing God’s love, pursuing God’s will, doing God’s work, and doing it for all of God’s people…

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One question that I seem to be getting more of these days is around motivation. Not only are people asking how to get motivated, but they are also asking how they can stay motivated.

People often say that motivation doesn’t really last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar

Ziglar certainly knew a lot about how to motivate us and more importantly how to keep us motivated. And he would also be the first one to remind us that motivation is temporary unless it is coupled with action. It is one thing to be motivated about setting a goal or getting inspired by the thought of a new project, and it is something completely different in taking the actions necessary to achieve our goals or complete our projects.

Sometimes we can use a motivated mindset as the spark that leads us to take the actions necessary for our productivity or success.

For some of us, this is how we are wired. When we are feeling good and life is better than good, finding sources of motivation is easy, our creativity is inspired, we are filled with hope, and we end up crushing our tasks and to-do lists. When we are feeling motivated, we may exercise a little longer and push a little harder.

When we are feeling motivated, we may make better choices in what we do, what we eat, and how we treat our bodies.

But what happens when we aren’t feeling so good, or when life isn’t going quite the way we want it to be going? What happens when we really don’t feel like exercising, going to work, or staying on our eating plan?

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Proactive or reactive. I did or did not. I can or cannot. I will or will not. When we look at those statements quickly, which words resonate with us personally? What I typically see is that people who connect with the words proactive, I did, I can, and I will tend to be more action-oriented and results-focused.

There is no right or wrong answer here.

Those of us who may have felt more comfortable with the words reactive, I did not, I cannot, and I will not, are sometimes less action-oriented and not as worried about the results. Some of us in this group are comfortable letting others take the actions necessary to achieve the results we are seeking.

One of the best lessons that I have learned that has impacted my personal life and my career has been to understand the difference between “will” and “skill.” In most cases, a skill can be something we acquire over time. Yet no matter how proficient we become at a certain skill, if we do not have the will to actually use the skill, we will always come up short when it comes to the achievement of our goals and dreams. Action orientation begins with the will…

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Whether we find ourselves setting the pace for the race, or just trying to keep the pace, we should always find time to give our mind and body a little rest.

Some of you have shared that these past several months have given you a chance to slow down, get back into forgotten hobbies, or start new ones.

Spending more quality time with friends and family.

And others have shared that they have never been busier and that their mental stress and physical fatigue have never been higher with little or no time to take a breather.

In a bigger, faster, harder, go go go, world, sometimes we get so wrapped up in trying to keep up, we forget to take care of ourselves along the way. We schedule more meetings or calls than we can fit into our day.

We squeeze more work into our already jam-packed weekends and try and justify it by saying that it “needs” to get done. Or we try and fool ourselves into believing that we are the only ones who can do it, denying our mind and body the rest we need to perform at our best.

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Why Sales Training Programs Fail

Reason #6:

Customizing or personalizing a program makes so much sense these days as sales teams want relevancy in the classroom and buyers want to engage with well-educated and well-trained selling professionals. The intent for both training providers and organizations to meet this need is solid, however, the breakdown comes when one or both parties try and over-architect the training program or over-reach and try and make the program do more than can possibly be done, or even more than what is actually necessary. The impact of this usually manifests itself in a few key places.
  1. The customization/personalization schedule gets delayed
  2. The trickle-down impact here is that the training schedule also gets delayed
  3. This places stress on both the company and its training partner
  4. Students are overwhelmed in the classroom
  5. And one of two things happens here. They shut down and only absorb a portion of the training. Worse, go back to their territory and the real-world and go straight back to their old comfortable way of selling.
Again, customization and/or personalization makes so much sense. But in reality, we only have so much time to get across the most important part of the learning so we do not want to dilute the skills, ideas, and concepts by overdoing it all at one time.
A solid training program and roadmap will allow for layering in additional content and building upon the initial concepts and processes. It will also give sales managers a path toward coaching and mentoring in small bites, as opposed to boiling the sales training ocean all at one time.
Best Practice #1: Keep it simple. Make it powerful and impactful but keep it simple. The more we try and over-engineer a sales methodology or process, the harder it is to roll it out to the field. Even with highly educated sales personnel and extremely seasoned and successful sales management and leadership, the more that we make it harder than it has to be, the less it will actually be adopted and embraced by our sellers.
Best Practice #2: When customizing or personalizing a program, think about bringing the management and leadership teams in first. Get their buy-in and make sure that they are comfortable delivering the message when the trainer or the training company is not there. Interact and engage them during the customization process early and often so that the program doesn’t become so overwhelming and something that will be lost on the salespeople.
Best Practice #3: Start with something as close to off-the-shelf as possible first. When you have made your selection to work with one of the proven training programs that are available, you have probably chosen one with a proven track record of success. Their program is successful because it is their program, one that they have successfully delivered for at least a couple of decades. You will be shocked to find out how much of what they already have will work, save tons of money on customization, accelerate the launch of your training program, and learn what parts you really should consider customizing after you have run a few classes.
Remember, lessons happen in the classroom, the learning happens in the field. This means that if we overcomplicate it in the classroom, and they never take it to the field and try and apply it, we have wasted a lot of time and money. Build a program that is modular by design. This way you can get the most important elements into the hands of the sales team sooner, start experiencing results faster, and then layer on more tips and techniques, ideas, and concepts over the next few quarters. Layering in additional techniques is another good spot for the power of e-learning and online courses, tips, and techniques.