SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR |  RSS | | REPRINT
|
Best Practices Deconstructed
June 25, 2009
By Holly Dolezalek
Business clichés abound, and it's difficult to decide which is the most overused. But the phrase, "best practices," is a top competitor. People use the term to mean anything from a defined mandatory procedure to a really good idea. But in training, the stakes are high for this shopworn phrase. Using it inaccurately leads to misconceptions, waste, and failed objectives.
So what is a "best practice"? Best practices have several characteristics. One is that they aren't procedures; they're a choice among options. They apply to situations where there isn't one defined method that is considered the only way to proceed. Another is that they make a difference—they result in more sales, better trained employees, better customer relationships, a better reputation for the company, and so on. Finally, best practices can be replicated; that is, when taught to others, they achieve similar or the same results.
But "can be" is not the same thing as "should be." And that's where many companies—and their training programs—go wrong. "Our research has shown that best practices from one industry don't necessarily work in another, and they don't even necessarily work from one company to another," says Dave Stein, the founder and CEO of ES Research Group, a sales research firm in West Tisbury, MA. "When you're talking about best practices in sales, for example, you have to understand how customers buy; the industry they're buying in; the capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses of the product; and all sorts of other factors, before you know whether a practice is really a best practice."
Stein likens the concept to prescription drugs, which can be very effective in just the right circumstances—but in the wrong circumstances can be not only ineffective but disastrous.
Strategy First
"Best practices are best employed and deployed when they're discovered by the company that's going to use them," Stein says. "There's no reason to reinvent the wheel every time you have a challenge. But you do have to do a comprehensive assessment within your organization to define the approaches, strategies, tactics and tools, and the environment in which these will be used."
Steve Andersen is the president and managing director of Performance Methods, Inc. (PMI), a best practice consultancy and training organization in Atlanta. He started the company 10 years ago because his years as a chief sales officer at three different technology companies had taught him it was possible to buy a ton of training and have none of it stick. He explains his firm is a consultancy first and then a training organization, because it brings elements of strategy together before creating a training program. In other words, PMI doesn't tell companies what best practices are; instead, it helps them find out for themselves.
For several years, PMI has had Honeywell, an aerospace technology company headquartered in Morris Township, NJ, as a client. When Honeywell came to PMI, its sales force was making money, but its leaders wanted to take it to the next level. So PMI arranged interviews with some 50 of Honeywell's most successful salespeople around the globe. The interviews weren't taped, but PMI's analysts took copious notes and asked open-ended questions. "We asked them, 'When you win, how and why are you winning? If you lose, what accounts for it? When a customer tells you they're delighted, what delights them? What makes a relationship strong and sustainable, and how do you know when you're creating value for clients?'" Andersen says.
Andersen warns against only looking at one moment in time or asking about only one key point in the process, and he also suggests that very little information about best practices can be gained from surveys that ask closed-ended questions. "We ask them about the whole process, from beginning to end, when they go the distance," Andersen says. "In any creative process, such as selling, it's a given that there are alternative routes to the same destination, and that there isn't necessarily a given order. You're not looking for the only way to do it, you're looking for the best way to do it, and to find out what different things typically are involved when you win."
The point of these interviews was to look for trends in what successful salespeople were saying, put those trends in actionable categories, and go over the findings with sales leadership so as to make recommendations. As Andersen points out, there's no point in training anyone in practices when you don't know whether they work or not. "Many vendors we see in the training market have programs they've already created, and plenty of them haven't been modified since the '80s, or even the '70s," he says. "That's ridiculous. It's a different world than it was three years ago, and it's certainly different than 10 or 20 years ago."
Not all managers or executive leaders are going to be up for investigating best practices this diligently, Andersen concedes. If the point is to teach basic skills, then some prepackaged training makes a lot of sense, and an assessment like this isn't necessary. But if leadership is looking for a transformation in a sales force, for example, a whole new level of success, then they're going to have to take the time to go out and look for it.
They're also going to have to resist the blandishments of training vendors that say they customize their learning programs to fit what's working at the company already, Andersen says. "Everyone says they customize," he warns. "You have to ask them some questions, such as 'Do you want to use what's currently working in the organization, or do you want to throw that out and start over? Are you willing to involve our thought leaders and the sales force in discussions about what's working and what's not? Are you willing to validate whether what you decide to train on is going to meet our company's business objectives?' If they resist the idea of changing their program, than what they have is neither customized nor best practices."
Shelf Life of Ice Cream
LaVon Koerner, president of RevenueStorm, a performance consultancy in Elk Grove Village, IL, sees the debate about best practices in much the same terms. He has found that many companies try to find best practices without going the distance, and instead use practices that are neither industry- nor company-specific. He has seen many companies fail to try to validate the practices they decide on, and even more that don't refresh what they practice regularly. "These things have the shelf life of ice cream, because business conditions change so quickly," he says.
But Koerner sees another roadblock to success by way of best practices: former best practitioners. "Many managers still see the business through the eyes of their experience when they were in the field, which is often years or even decades ago," Koerner says. "They're benefactors of how they used to do it, and they don't want to change what they've benefited from. Often, they don't understand that competitors or the market or the product or service itself has changed, and they become the biggest obstacles to the process of discovering what best practices really are."
For that reason, when trying to discover best practices, it can be helpful to involve people in the process who haven't been with the company very long, or who haven't been in their current role for long. "Often, the new VP of sales wants to know what he or she has inherited, and those people are candidates for doing best-in-class benchmarking," Koerner says.
A detailed inventory of current talent, compared to industry benchmarks, is the only way to make sure you're teaching the right practices to the right people, Koerner argues. "If you don't inventory your talent and benchmark, you will commit three sins: You will overtrain in the wrong competencies, undertrain in the right competencies, and miss certain competencies altogether."
For Koerner, the best way to think about best practices for sales methods is in terms of a go-to-market strategy. But the idea applies as well to any industry or company, because it captures several things: Who is your customer? What do they want? What do you have to offer them? How can you convince them they want what you have to offer?
"A text without a context is a pretext," Koerner says. "To find out what is a best practice, you have to have a context for that practice. In sales, the go-to-market strategy dictates the set of best practices you draw from, because the practices that make sense if you're doing transactional selling don't necessarily make sense if you're doing solution selling."
Whatever your industry, whatever your challenges, the lesson is that when it comes to real best practices, there are no shortcuts. But ES Research's Stein points out that there are serious rewards when management agrees to invest the time and effort involved. "There are always tools lying around that work in an organization," he says, "and there's no reason why those can't be captured, reverse engineered, and made applicable to a broader audience."
|
SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | MOST POPULAR | RSS |
|
|
| Back to Training Index |
|
|
