7. Square pegs

If you’ve made it this far in my emails, I’m going to assume you’re at least a tiny bit interested in the idea of transcending L&D 1.0 to become a performance partner, ready to redesign the future of work.

Bloody marvellous! 

And as I’ve mentioned before, the shift is not easy - but it is worth it.

One reason it’s difficult is because of something I’ve observed for years - but it’s only more recently I realised why it's so problematic. 

Let me explain with a short story…

Whilst working as the only L&D person at a small software company, I found myself in an impromptu conversation with the Head of Sales. The discussion turned to her challenges in recruiting and retaining salespeople. 

Her problem was less about finding good people, and more about keeping them. Often they would fail to hit sales targets, become despondent, and leave before they made it past six months.

Within minutes, it became clear ineffective onboarding was leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity cost. If we could halve how long it took new salespeople to hit their targets, we calculated a potential increase of $300k of sales each year (a significant shift for their small team).

She mentioned how they were refreshing their onboarding program. “It’s all a bit of a mess right now,” she explained. “So we’ve decided to deploy a new platform and reorganise all our training by topic - company info, systems, products, etc.”

Her expectation being that once the new starters had access to more organised content, they’d get up to speed more quickly.

But I was sceptical. 

I requested an example of a task these newbies were struggling with. Something that if we improved, would make a meaningful difference.

“Running product demos for new customers” she fired back without hesitation. 

So, I did some digging. I met with some newbies and asked about their experience. They all responded with the same thing: “We watched past demos, read the materials and tested the product. But each customer is unique and they all have different needs.”

It became clear they understood the products, could figure out the systems, and had decent enough sales skills. What they lacked was a consistent, proven way to prepare for and run the demo. 

Every customer conversation required them to figure things out from scratch:

• What information should they use to tailor the demo?

• How should they decide which features to demonstrate?

• What are the most effective ways to handle objections?

• What steps should they take after the meeting?

The answers existed, but only in the heads of the experienced salespeople - new starters had to figure them out from scratch.

It became clear that some thoughtfully designed workflows could improve the situation. Workflows that guided the newbies through everything they needed to do before, during and after the demo, to set them up for success.

And then, we would also introduce a mechanism to remind the sales managers to check whether new starters were using the workflows, thus empowering them to give timely, relevant feedback i.e., are they at least following all the steps before, during and after the demo?

Not only could we introduce workflows, but we could also help them make better use of their content. Instead of organising it by topic - which was disconnected from the work - it could be repurposed and embedded into the workflows themselves. 

Excitedly, I raced back to my manager, who was the Head of HR. After all, it’s not often you get to help a team with measurable performance outcomes! Even if we could reduce how long it took newbies to hit their sales targets by a few weeks, I could prove tangible ROI because it was tied to a dollar value.

What do you think he said?

I’ll be back.
- Ant 

PS. The concept of workflows will be an ongoing theme within these emails - stay tuned.