In this article, Guillermo Herbozo explains why the goal of sales supervisors is often forgotten. Sales supervisors spend less than 20% of their time developing the skills of their team members. Even worse, the quality of the time invested is not ideal. Absence of a strong dedicated coach is perhaps the largest cause of failure for sales representatives. It also leads to increasingly high levels of employee turnover and soaring recruiting, on-boarding and training costs across industries. The solution is…

Guillermo Herbozo shares an evergreen post on improving team effectiveness.  In our quest to improve team effectiveness in a sustainable way, we have come to a seemingly obvious conclusion. There is no one stand-alone intervention for making change sustainable. Improving team performance requires a combination of efforts and interventions, as discussed on the post Coaching is critical but is not enough. What has also become clear to us is that if a team wants to obtain and sustain improvement they…

Guillermo Herbozo shares the key tips of top facilitators.  In the context of a huddle, there are several things great facilitators do. As a reminder, we define a huddle as a short, recurring training session that is focused on building skills, one well-defined topic at a time. These sessions are led by team leaders (e.g., supervisors) and have a limited number of participants. For more about huddles and how to make them strong read this post. The topic of facilitation…

Guillermo Herbozo shares effective guiding principles when implementing an adult learning program in the workplace. No one would know that they just attended three weeks of training” a distressed Manager from a Top 3 US Telecommunications company recently told me. The team had just completed onboarding and most of the team members didn’t have a good understanding of the company’s processes or systems; and they lacked many of the skills required for the job.  “I’ve been working here for 10…

Guillermo Herbozo shares a few key tips to ensure a positive outcome when conversing with a customer.  Most conversations, whether you’re in sales, customer service, retention or any other customer facing position, start with a greeting. Then they move along until close and follow up. Now, how often do you review the customer conversation practices in your organization to see how they can be improved? This post is an invitation to do precisely that. Its focus will be reviewing best…