Area9 Lyceum Blog

Organizations such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Centre for Medicare Services, and legislation such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Food Safety and Traceability Act (FSMA), have created professional standards and training requirements for businesses and institutions. When audited, the onus is on each entity to prove that they have met these specifications.

Sales and sales management training have the double hurdle of having to train many people over a vast territory (for example, employees in satellite offices or travelling sales reps) and with varied experience levels ranging from novice to expert.

Many traditional corporate training tools are the unfortunate cause of learning fatigue — a combination of ineffective, one-size-fits-all e-learning, disengaged learners, and tight training deadlines. Do you recognize any of those symptoms in your training?

When failure is not an option, compliance training must be done right the first time. But what if compliance training could do more than mitigate risk? What if training could teach employees to excel when the stakes are high?

Traditional corporate sales training has three components that often leave sales reps dissatisfied:

Wherever you are in the world, you’ll always be able to find a McDonald’s restaurant. The McDonald’s secret to global popularity can’t be found in any secret sauce: its success is a result of the corporation’s cultural astuteness. Whether serving a market that is predominantly vegetarian, or one that avoids beef, or pork, or enjoys fish, McDonald’s adjusts its menu to the local cultural flavor — to great success. While we aren’t responsible for McDonald’s corporate learning we have to assume that someone at McDonald’s at some time received cross-cultural training.

A compliance officer needs to understand the laws and regulations regarding their industry, but so do the employees within their company. Without company-wide knowledge of compliance, a company is put at risk for all sorts of noncompliance issues, and faces litigation.

In 2016, Millennials surpassed Gen Xers to become the largest part of the American workforce. In 2019, Millennials will outnumber the Baby Boomers in overall population. Sales management is going to have to get used to the changing attitudes and priorities of these Millennials who will soon make up the bulk of their workforce.

A good company looks ahead to anticipate opportunities before they arrive, and spends resources preparing their workforce to meet those opportunities. Online e-learning, as a way of accomplishing this, is an obvious plus for most companies as it easily reduces cost of training programs for employees. But companies used to traditional classroom learning will wonder if the reduced cost means sacrificing training quality.

You’d think that the training itself would be the most important part of compliance training. In many ways it is. But it might surprise you to learn that often, for a bank compliance officer, detailed reporting of compliance training may be more important than the training itself.

What’s better for sales than understanding the key differentiators of your product? What’s worse than not knowing? In a recent survey, less than one-third of buyers felt that their vendors were well informed. Is it acceptable that two out of three conversations with vendors are considered useless by the prospective purchaser.

Human Resources builds its team by bringing talented workers into the company. This is great, but to make a real lasting business impact the department needs a talent management strategy; it needs to hire highly engaged, high-performing employees all the time. Hiring employees who you know will be all that seems like it could be a difficult problem, but is it, really?