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Announcement

I am delighted to announce that BBA Consulting Group Inc. has reached an agreement with a wonderful training and consulting firm called Take Charge Learning.  Take Charge Learning (www.takechargelearning.com), has acquired our Proactive Service® workshops and consulting business and promise to enhance and expand our programs.

What is exciting about this acquisition is Take Charge Learning itself.  It is a service training company.  The principals, Laura Sukorokoff and Sean Hamilton bring with them an in-depth understanding of the service business and particularly customer service.  Sean knows service from the inside out.  He has worked his entire career in service, first as a field service technician, then sales and marketing management and, more recently, service management and ownership.  Laura’s focus extends to the management team and how to build dedicated teams with a strong service culture.

Take Charge Learning will seamlessly step in to maintain our existing contracts and customers.  If you are participating in the Proactive Service® self-delivery program, you will continue to have access to the videos and program documents without interruption.  In addition, Take Charge Learning will honour any outstanding quotations.  For my part, I will continue to work with Take Charge Learning throughout the transition. 

I have been blessed as a successful business consultant and trainer.  But that success was only possible because of you who have believed in me and had faith in my work and approaches.  Thank you all for your support over all of these years.  As I pass the Proactive Service® baton on to Take Charge Learning, I am confident that Laura and Sean will take our programs to a whole new level.

Thank you.

Jim Baston

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What To Look For in Self-Delivery Training

Looking to Self Deliver Soft Skills Training – Here’s What to Look For 

Last time I wrote about why you might consider delivering your own soft skills training in a blog entitled If You Want Something Done Right.  I realize that delivering soft skills training may not be for everyone, but the rewards of leading your team through a workshop can be significant and long lasting.  It can literally be a game changer.  For those who are looking to deliver soft skills training, here is what to look for when evaluating programs. 

If you are thinking about delivering training for your team, there are two options available to you.  One is to create your own training program and the other is to purchase a program ready made for self-delivery.  For this blog, I will focus on the ready-made option.  What follows are the key factors to consider when evaluating soft skills training programs that are designed for self-delivery. 

Relevance:  There are many excellent training programs out there, but not all may be directly relevant to your needs.  The more the training reflects the reality of the day-to-day challenges your team faces, the more effective it will be.  Therefore, if your team are highly skilled service professionals working in a business-to-business environment, then a program geared for non-technical, salespeople serving consumers in a retail store, may not be as impactful as you had hoped – no matter how good the quality of the training program is. 

Preparation Instructions:  Although not part of the actual facilitation, preparation instructions are important, particularly if this is the first time you are delivering the program.  These instructions should include specific preparation steps, and timelines to ensure that you are fully prepared for the training.   

Detailed Facilitation Notes:  The facilitation notes should provide you with adequate guidelines on how to facilitate the workshop.  If a PowerPoint presentation is included, the notes should be associated with each slide.  The key is to provide step-by-step instructions to minimize the time needed for preparation while ensuring your facilitation delivers the learning experience intended by the program. 

Background Notes:  Since facilitation plays an important role in how well participants grasp the subject matter, it is helpful to have background notes on the facilitation process itself.  Where applicable, it is helpful to understand why it is suggested that you use a particular example or present the material is a certain way.  The notes should also provide additional information on the point being presented that would not typically be included in the facilitation notes themselves. 

Customization:  One of the great advantages of self-delivery is the ability to customize the examples and relate them directly to the content.  The self-delivery program you consider should allow for this and provide the opportunity and instructions on what to customize.   With our Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop for example, we provide templates and instructions for the customizable elements.  

Videos and Video Access:  An excellent way to communicate information and create the learning experience intended.  Although not absolutely necessary, accompanying videos are a big plus if the training you are considering includes them. 

Follow-up:  Perhaps the most important component of any program is the follow-up that takes place after the training.  People learn by repetition and managers would do well by repeating the key learning points at every opportunity once the training is completed.  Anything that the training package you are considering has to enable you to do this easily is important.  In our Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop, we provide ongoing access to view the videos after the training so that they can be used for onboarding and refreshing.  We also provide follow-up emails to keep the core ideas top of mind as well as short exercises that can use during regular service meetings to help participants practice the core skills. 

Making the decision to lead your own training session is not for the faint of heart but the rewards in the form of behaviour and cultural change can far outweigh the effort.  If you are considering leading your own session for your team, evaluate the program to ensure fit with your operations and that it provides what you need to support the behaviour change you are counting on. 

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. 
– Benjamin Franklin 

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If You Want Something Done Right

If you want something done right, do it yourself.  I am certain that this old adage is familiar to you, but in this era of specialization, does it still ring true?  Those of us who had to cut our own hair during the pandemic may feel it doesn’t.  And when you think of certain technical disciplines or fields that require specialized skills or knowledge that literally take years to master it doesn’t make sense at all.  

However, there is one area though where doing it yourself can make sense and can lead to a better result.  The area I am referring to is delivering soft skills training to your team.  

Now, you might be thinking that I have lost my mind.  Doesn’t training require a skill of facilitating that is honed by years of practice?  And doesn’t training require knowledge that may take years to learn?  Time is in limited supply and don’t I already have enough to do?  I’ll try to answer each of these, but first, let’s look at why training your own team can be so effective.

The purpose of training is typically to impart new skills that result in a desired change in behaviour.  You may send your team on spreadsheet training to become more proficient at preparing information so that their resulting reports are more accurate and reader friendly while at the same time freeing up more time for them to attend to other responsibilities.  But training in itself is not enough to guarantee you will get the change in behaviour that you are looking for.  Studies have shown that the quality of training is not the most important determinant of behaviour change.  The most important predictor of behaviour change related to training is management and how they talk about and support the training.  Specifically, it depends on what managers do before, during and after the training takes place.  Do they help participants understand how the training will help them in their job performance?  Do they communicate why it is important and how it will impact them personally?  Do they talk about the training in a manner that speaks of this importance?  Do they participate actively in the training itself?  Do they follow up on the training?

When you lead the training on soft skills, by your very actions you are communicating the importance of the training for your employees’ performance and personal success.  In addition, you have the opportunity to ensure that the training is directly relevant to the attendees by including examples and describing situations that resonate with them.  You can make certain that the training speaks to the overall strategy of the organization and your employees’ role in that strategy.  When you deliver the training, you are more likely to follow up and to mention various aspects of the training during future meetings.  In short, by delivering the training yourself, you can help to embed the concepts into the culture of your organization and clearly answer the question of why you are doing this.

Delivering training to your team also provides you with the flexibility to adjust the training schedule to meet the needs of the business.  You can schedule the training to take place all at once, or spread it out over several sessions.  You can create “homework” assignments to allow participants to practice the key concepts by applying what they have learned in the field.  And best of all, you can make these changes literally on the fly.

So, let’s go back to the questions raised previously.  Leading soft skills training for your team has great benefits, but doesn’t it require facilitation skills, subject matter expertise and time?  Let’s consider these in turn.

Facilitation skills:  Facilitation is an important skill that all good trainers rely on and it is true that good trainers have honed these skills over time.  But, with a little guidance, most of us with little or no experience can facilitate effective discussions that get the critical points across.  Remember, we’re not facilitating high-level discussions between world leaders to find the secret to ever lasting peace.  We are simply trying to engage the class in discussions and exercises to help them discover the key learning principles for themselves.

Knowledge: The knowledge required for customer service training is simply common sense.  In fact, customer service training is one of those subjects where everyone already has the core knowledge, including those who are there for the training.  Everyone knows that they should be polite, tuck in their shirts and practice good grooming to make a favourable impression for example.  Therefore, those that don’t demonstrate good customer service skills are typically not ignorant of what constitutes good customer service, they just choose not to apply what they know.  That means that the challenge of getting behaviour change in soft skills training is not a matter of teaching participants what to do, but rather why to do it. (And that is why management involvement is so important).

Time:  By training your team in customer service, you are taking time away from some of the other things that you could be doing.  There is no getting around this.  Time is a limited resource and if you spend it doing one thing, it has to come at the expense of not having the time to do something else.  The question has to be, is my time as a manager well used if I spend some of it training my team in customer service?  To answer this question, we need to consider how we are measured as managers.  Many years ago I was struck by the truth in the statement, “As managers, we are recognized not so much for what we do, but for what our team does.”  While we as managers are measured and compensated for obtaining certain results, it is our employees’ efforts that generate those outcomes.  So, if the performance of our employees determines our success, then it makes sense to do all that we can to help our employees perform at their best.  From this perspective, training our employees no longer looks like a separate task outside of the role of “managing” but rather an integral part of the role.  

So, if it makes sense to lead the customer service training for our employees, maybe we should change the old adage to read:  If you want customer service training done right, do it yourself.

“As managers, we are recognized not so much for what we do, but for what our team does.”

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Refresher Exercises Announcement

We are pleased to announce a new follow-up program for the very successful Proactive Service® workshop called The Refresher Exercises. The Refresher Exercises are designed as short modules for managers to include as part of their regular service/safety meetings to help maintain focus on business development by the field service team. The modules reinforce the key concepts of Proactive Service® and help actively engage field service professionals in proactive business development for their organizations.

The Refresher Exercises come complete with step-by-step instructions, videos and exercises for the manager to engage the field team and promote discussion on the team’s role in promoting services to their customers. The field team leaves each session with a commitment to apply the principles learned which contributes to the desired behaviour change.

The Proactive Service® Refresher Exercises Include:

  1. Eight individual exercise sessions ranging in duration from 15 to 30 minutes. (Note: Delivery of the exercises can easily be adjusted to increase or decrease the duration of each session).
  2. A concise facilitation guidebook providing helpful suggestions on how to present each exercise.
  3. A short slide presentation for each exercise session to guide the discussion.
  4. Links to streaming videos presenting the key concepts.

The Proactive Service® workshop is a program to help field service professionals take a proactive role in business development for their companies. It does this by helping the field team recognize that making recommendations to help their customers is an important part of the service they provide. Coupled with our post training follow up emails, these refresher exercises will help you integrate Proactive Service® into your service culture.

For more information on Proactive Service® and the Refresher Exercises visit www.jimbaston.com or email me at jim@jimbaston.com.

Jim Baston

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It’s Not Them, It’s You

I just finished a book that resonated strongly with me.  It’s entitled It’s Not Them, It’s You by Laura Sukorokoff.  The book discusses the role of management in employee engagement and I saw immediately how the ideas in Laura’s book would contribute to the success of any service leaders’ efforts to enthusiastically engage their field service teams in proactive business development.

When talking about “proactive business development”, we are referring to getting technicians to take a proactive role in looking for products and services that they can offer to help a customer to be better off.  It might be a product that will improve efficiency and reduce energy consumption or it might be a service that will extend asset life or improve the safety of the operation.  Whatever it is, the key to their proactive efforts is to help customers recognize what they can do to make improvements by bringing the ideas to the customers’ attention.

Our success in getting our techs to enhance the service they provide through these proactive efforts will be largely dependent upon their level of engagement.  A field service professional who is engaged, will be more likely to take these proactive steps more enthusiastically.

Now, there are several things that contribute to level of field team engagement including how the proactive role is described and the processes and systems to support their proactive efforts.  But a critical component, and one that can sometimes be overlooked, is how the manager engages their employees and that is largely dependent upon how the manager is perceived by his or her team.

Which brings me to It’s Not Them, It’s You.  In her book, Laura addresses this issue head on.  Her focus is on what managers can do to build strong, professional and trust-based relationships with their teams to engage them fully and enthusiastically in the business.  She introduces a simple, yet powerful, model that she calls RESPECT.  RESPECT is an acronym for the seven steps she has identified to engage (and retain) employees, namely:

  1. Develop a Relationship with the people on your team.
  2. Have Empathy for those with whom you work.
  3. Support the members of your team
  4. Promote the ideas of your team members
  5. Empower your team members to be great on their own terms.
  6. Have Consideration for their feelings.
  7. Trust them, and be trustworthy yourself.

What really impressed me about this book is that it does more than just explain the relationship between RESPECT and employee engagement and retention.  Laura provides solid and practical advice on how to interact with employees to build RESPECT and attain the desired engagement, all the while cognisant of the realities of management. For example, although Laura believes strongly in the importance of having one-on-one meetings with all direct reports, she acknowledges that this is not always practical to do this when you have large numbers reporting to you and provides suggestions on what to do in this case.  This is particularly important when the field team spends most time away from the office and often in remote locations.

If you are interested in learning more about It’s Not Them, It’s You and the work that Laura does in this area, visit https://www.cchangelearning.com 

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Supercharging Revenue Generation Through the Field Service Team – Defining the Steps to Supercharging your Technicians’ Revenue Generation Efforts

In my last blog, I spoke about how the success of our field team’s business development efforts will be dependent upon whether they accept that their proactive efforts are part of their service role and whether the customer sees value in their recommendations.  We can do this when we take a service perspective.  How?  Treat revenue generation as the valuable service that it is and engage our technicians in the proactive promotion of our services in a manner that we would be proud to tell our customers about.  Then, support our techs’ efforts as we would any other service that we offer.

“Super Service”

Let’s look at this a little more closely.  Imagine you are about to add a new service to your portfolio and you want to take steps to ensure it’s successful.  For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll call the new service “Super Service”.  The service you are about to add has the following characteristics:

  • It complements existing services (does not replace any of the services you are currently providing)
  • It’s a new concept – the customer needs to be educated on the value
  • Some new knowledge and skills are required but your existing technicians can perform the service – no additional staffing required
  • Existing tools and test equipment can be used – no significant capital equipment needed
  • It has the potential to be highly profitable – efficiency in delivery is critical
  • You must rely on another division within your organization to deliver a small part of the service
  • Super Service has the potential to be a game changer

The question is:  What specific steps will you take to ensure the success of this new service?

Take a few minutes to write down what steps you’ll take to launch this service successfully.  Don’t worry about completeness of this list for now.  We’ll come back to this list later.  We only want you to start generating ideas about the steps you would include.

…………………………..

To successfully launch this new service, here is a list of possible steps we could take:

  1. Define the service
  2. Support the initiative
  3. Get buy-in from supporting divisions
  4. Talk the walk
  5. Tell our customers
  6. Maintain focus

How does this list compare to yours?  Chances are there are a lot of similarities. 

Using the Super Service to Supercharge Revenue Generation

Now, look at the description of Super Service once more.  Notice that the Super Service described also applies to the actions of business promotion by our field service team.  Through their recommendations for example, their efforts can complement our existing services.  Their actions will require explanation to our customers so that they understand the motive behind, and the value in, their efforts.  Although some new knowledge and skills may be needed by the techs, no additional staffing will be required.  In addition, there will be no need for any significant capital increases and the results of their efforts can be highly profitable.  Finally, our field team’s promotion of products and services can be a game changer if we can help our customers see how they’ll be better off for those recommendations.

So, we can supercharge our techs’ revenue generation by treating their efforts as the valuable service that they are.  This means identifying those things that we must do well in order to successfully encourage and support their efforts.

Our next step is to determine and apply the specific actions we’ll take.  Using the list above, my next blog will look at some examples of actions we can take.  Please note that the actions that we identify may not necessarily be the actions that you, in your specific situation will take.  It’s the approach that is important here, so simply apply the same approach used here to your list.

Reflection

Go back the list of steps that you have created that will ensure that the proactive efforts of your field service team will be successful.  Is the list complete?  What’s missing?  Rework the list until you assured that those steps cover all that is necessary for your success.  

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Sincerely,
Jim Baston
President
BBA Consulting Group Inc.

A good leader is not necessarily the most popular person in their business, but the best ones are liked because they are respected for their clarity and vision.

– Alan Sugar

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Supercharging Revenue Generation Through the Field Service Team – It’s All About Perception – Are You “Selling” or “Serving”?

In my last blog, I wrote of the opportunity to stand out from the crowd by helping the customer recognize that they are better off for having engaged us.  Our techs play a huge role in this.  They are in the best position to recognize the opportunities for improvement and typically have the trust and ear of the customer.  However, the success of our efforts to engage our field teams in revenue generation depends on two key factors. The first is that the customer must see value in our technicians’ efforts.  The second is that our technicians must see their proactive recommendations as an integral part of the job that they do.  Achieving both outcomes relies on how we, as managers, define what the technicians are doing when they make recommendations to customers about a particular product or service.  Do we regard the field service team’s efforts as “selling” or “serving”?  Our perception of their actions can mean the difference between outstanding success and mediocrity.

“Selling”

Let’s start with the “selling” perspective.  Many service organizations appear to take a “selling” perspective.  You hear it in the language that’s used.  Managers talk about getting their field service team to “sell”. They use terms like “up-selling” and “cross-selling”.  Unfortunately, a “selling” perspective can have a negative impact on our ability to fully engage our technicians in promoting our products and services.

A selling perspective is centred on us – the service provider.  The focus is on how the customer can fulfill our needs.  It arises from the question, “How can we capitalize on our field service relationships to win more business from our customers and increase our revenues and profitability?” 

This can be problematic for a number of reasons:

Firstly, it can appear to suggest that business development is an opportunistic tactic rather than an integral part of the service strategy. 

As such, it can be perceived as an add-on to the tech’s main responsibility. If it’s perceived by the technician as an add-on to, and not part of, their main role of providing service, then the tech may regard making proactive recommendations as optional and not enthusiastically participate. 

Secondly, skills development tends to be focused on selling. 

Maslow famously said: “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”  When we see the task as “selling”, we may conclude that the solution to improve our techs’ performance is to provide them with selling skills.  Unfortunately, some of the sales training for techs has been adapted from sales programs developed for salespeople.  Such programs often include topics that prove uncomfortable for the technician – closing techniques, overcoming objections are just two examples that come to mind.  As a result, the technician may not see much relevance to what they do every day in the training and some may even resent being considered a “salesperson”.

Thirdly, a sales perspective has the potential to negatively impact trust with the customer. 

Our technicians typically have high levels of trust with our customers, partly due to the fact that they’re not there to sell the customer anything.  If we try to turn our technicians into salespeople, then the customer may perceive that the technician is “selling” to them.  When this happens, the customer becomes confused about the tech’s role and that foundation of trust is eroded.

Fourthly, a selling perspective is difficult to communicate to our customers. 

How do we communicate to the customer about our techs’ proactive efforts in a way that shows value for them?  Can you imagine if we said, “We’ve asked our technicians to look for more products and services to sell to you so that we can get more money out of you”.  Somehow, I don’t think this would resonate well with the customer.

“Serving”

When we see the proactive recommendations by our field service team as a “service” rather than a “sale”, we set the stage for enthusiastic engagement by our field service team and welcome acceptance by our customers.  That’s because the focus changes from being centered on us as the service provider to being centered on the customer and their needs.  Whereas the focus of the selling perspective is on how to get more money out of the customer, the focus of a service perspective is on how we can deliver a higher level of service to the customer through the recommendations of our field service team.

When we take a “service” perspective, identifying opportunities to help the customer becomes part of the service rather than an add-on to it.  Skills development considerations broaden to include all that’s needed to facilitate the techs’ efforts to share their recommendations with their customers rather than limited to “selling” products or services.  The techs’ efforts can add to the trust they have built by demonstrating the value of their recommendations from the customer’s perspective.  And it becomes easier to differentiate because we can discuss it with the customer in terms of what is in it for them. 

The “service” perspective positions the tech’s recommendations as part of their job – as important a part as their ability to repair and maintain the equipment they service.  We enhance our service and add significant value when our field service team makes recommendations to help our customers to be measurably better off.

Reflection

On a scale of 1 – 10 (“10” being “promoting products and services is an important part of the service that we provide”, and “1” being “promoting products and services is not part of my job and should be done by others”), how would you rate the general view of your field service team of the role of promoting products and services?

What are the factors that caused you to give the score that you did?

What steps could you take to increase your field team’s score to a “10”?

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston
President
BBA Consulting Group Inc.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

 – Henry David Thoreau

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Supercharging Revenue Generation Through the Field Service Team – Differentiating Service Through the Field Team’s Proactive Efforts

This is the first in a series of blogs on “supercharging” revenue generation through the field service team.  If you encourage your field team to promote your products and services to your customers and you are disappointed in the results so far, please read on. 

Our field service teams represent an excellent opportunity to increase revenues and profitability by proactively making recommendations of our products and services to our customers.  They need only bring their ideas to the customer’s attention while they are on site performing maintenance.  And the revenue generated in this manner can be highly profitable.  No increase in overheads.  No additional travel or other incremental costs.  Profits go straight to the bottom line.

It sounds too good to be true.  And for some of us this must seem to be the case.  Despite our best efforts, we struggle to get our teams as engaged in business promotion as we would like them to be.  We fail to meet our revenue generation goals.  We continue to be disappointed in the results of our efforts.

In this blog series entitled Supercharging Revenue Generation Through the Field Service Team, we’ll look at the possible reason why our results fail to reach expectations and look at specific steps that we can take to turn those results around.  We’ll examine how any service organization can supercharge their revenue generation through their field service teams and use those efforts to stand out from the crowd.

Standing Out From the Crowd

The reality for every service provider is that it is an increasingly competitive world out there.  The challenge is how to stand out from the crowd.  How can we differentiate our service from our competitors when our customers see very little difference between us? The answer is that we can do this by helping the customer answer “yes” to this question, “Am I better off for having known you?” 

Imagine a customer reflecting on our work over the past several months.  Will they say, “Not only does my equipment continue to run exceptionally well, but we’re saving more money today than we’ve ever saved before.” or “… we’re achieving better productivity than we’ve ever achieved before.” or “… we’re getting fewer complaints from tenants than we ever have before.”, etc.  When our customers say those things about us, we will stand out from our competitors and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Our Customers Want us to Make Recommendations

Studies suggest that helping the customer to be better off is exactly what our customers want their service providers to do.  In May of 2015, the Globe and Mail newspaper published an article entitled “Why Customer Satisfaction is Overrated”.  In the article, they reported on research that found that 75 percent of organizations that left one vendor to go to another, were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the vendor they left at the time that they left.  Upon further investigation, researchers found that the reason that satisfied or even very satisfied customers left was that they thought that the company that they were going to was in a better position to help them achieve their long term business goals.  This study suggests that good customer service, although important, is not enough.  Today’s customer is looking for a business partner who can use their specific knowledge and expertise to help them achieve their goals.

Our field service team is in the best position to recognize opportunities that can help our customers achieve their goals.  They have the technical expertise, they understand our company’s capabilities, they have an intimate knowledge of our customer’s equipment and they have insight into our customers’ goals and challenges.  And, of course, they have direct access to speak with the customer.

Next time we will look at our perception of the proactive efforts of our field service teams and how our mindset may be impacting our results.

Reflection

Think about how your customers view your business:

  • Do they see you as a “service provider” or a “business partner”?
  • Do they claim they are better off for having engaged you? What steps do you take as an organization to help your customers see this value in your relationship? How do you measure your customers’ perception about this? 
  • How well does this customer viewpoint allow you to differentiate your business from your competitors?  How sustainable is this differentiation?

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston
President
BBA Consulting Group Inc.

Expect change. Analyze the landscape. Take the opportunities.
Stop being the chess piece; become the player. It’s your move.

– Tony Robbins

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Announcement: Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop

I am pleased to announce that we have developed a self-delivery version of our very successful Proactive Service® workshop to allow organizations to deliver top quality customer service training during these times of restricted travel and social distancing.  The program comes with a step-by-step presentation, videos highlighting the key points and clearly defined exercises so that anyone within your organization can deliver the workshop. 

The Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop is designed to help service organizations successfully and enthusiastically engage their field teams in making recommendations aimed at helping their customers to achieve their business goals.

Participants will learn:

  • Why making recommendations is a critical part of the service provided
  • How success depends on the customer’s perception of their credibility
  • Specific and practical steps to build credibility with the customer
  • How to make recommendations to the customer in a concise and engaging way
  • What to do if the customer says “no” and the risks are high

Click here to view the Workshop Topic Overview

Advantages of the Self-Delivery Option

The combination of videos, guided facilitator presentation and comprehensive workshop delivery notes means that anyone can effectively facilitate the workshop – no previous facilitation experience is necessary, and at a time and location that is most convenient.

This option provides a number of advantages including:

  • Ability to deliver an excellent training experience during these times of limited travel
  • Flexibility in workshop delivery such as:
    • From small to larger groups
    • One day delivery or smaller segments delivered over a set period of time
    • Adjust emphasis and time to specific components of the workshop most relevant under current circumstances
  • Opportunity to include relevant examples from real-life experience
  • Thought provoking follow up emails encourage and reinforce behaviour change
  • Videos can also be used for:
    • Keeping core concepts top of mind
    • On-boarding new employees

What’s Included

  • Subscription to a series of seven videos – each focused on a key component or sub-component of Proactive Service® and presented under the following headings:
    • Personal Credibility
    • Professional Credibility
    • Proactive Recommendations
  • Facilitator slide deck
    • Step-by-step guide and presentation notes to deliver the workshop materials
  • Facilitator “how-to” video
  • Facilitator guidelines
    • Background information
    • Scripts for each slide
    • Suggestions for leading the in-class exercises
  • Participant workbook and exercises
  • Pocketbook of Proactive Service®
  • Follow-up emails to reinforce key learning points

For more information on our Proactive Service® Self-Delivery Workshop, please visit our website at www.jimbaston.com and click on Proactive Service® or contact me directly at jim@jimbaston.com.

Sincerely,

Jim Baston

President

BBA Consulting Group Inc.

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Preventative Maintenance for Business Promotion – Step 6

Today’s equipment typically runs on a software platform and it is important to keep that software current.  Not updating software may compromise performance and may result in errors and ultimately failure.  A key part of our field team’s role when performing maintenance therefore, is checking the equipment’s software version and updating it to maintain currency.

Updating the Field Service Team

In our efforts to support our field service team as they look for opportunities to help the customer, we must also ensure that we keep them current.  As a service organization, we are always adding to our portfolio of products and services.  If we do not continually update our field team on these new capabilities, then not everyone on the team will be familiar with all that we do.

This is problematic because if one of our field service professionals is unaware of a capability, they will not recognize that there is an opportunity to help.

Even if they are aware, if they are not comfortable talking about the capability at a high level with the customer, then they may avoid the discussion altogether.

There are some things that you may wish to consider as you determine the currency of your field service team.

  • Do you regularly update your team on your products and services?
  • Does this update include how each service provides value for the customer and which circumstances would make a customer a candidate to benefit?
  • Do you provide some suggested questions that the field professional could ask to uncover whether a customer would benefit from that product or service?
  • Do you provide opportunities for the field team to practice a conversation about the product or service in a safe environment (i.e. role plays)?
  • Do you help your team recognize the value to them and to their customers of keeping themselves updated on your capabilities?

We provide great value when our field service team uncovers opportunities that will help our customers to be better off.  This proactive approach to service will differentiate us from the crowd by helping our customers realize that they are better off as a result of working with us.

To keep our business development by our field service team working in tip-top order, we need to maintain it.

This maintenance includes:

  • Checking for overall mechanical condition and wear
  • Replacing, refurbishing, or cleaning of the wearable parts and consumables
  • Checking alignments and readjusting if applicable
  • Lubricating moving parts
  • Checking and updating spare parts inventories
  • Updating software to maintain currency

By regularly addressing these key maintenance tasks, we can be assured that the proactive efforts of our field team will deliver a service that goes beyond keeping our customers’ equipment running well and measurably helps them them achieve their business goals.

Let’s Connect

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“We cannot solve our problems with the
same thinking we used when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein