One of
the greatest challenges to selling professional
services is overcoming the "warm and fuzzy"
hurdle. Let's say you are a corporate
trainer. You made an excellent impression on the
Training & Development VP. Your interpersonal
skills are tops. Your materials are
professional. Your proposal is precise and
compelling. But...something is missing. The VP
asks about your track record, the degree of
change achieved with other clients. Was it 20%?
50%? 80%? Was the change sustained? For how
long? Have past trainees stayed with their
employers, or used their training to move up and
out? Can you meet these questions with the
quantifiable responses that will lead a corporate
team to buy into your training proposal?
Many professionals can't and as a result, they fail to
close corporate sales.
Having spent more than 10 years in corporations,
getting approval, or "buy-in" to new processes
or new suppliers is a simple and logical
process. An organization that's experiencing
significant employee turnover, or absenteeism,
is "blowing" their budget" which negatively
impacts their overall corporate performance.
That's a problem worth fixing, especially in the
case of public companies who don't want to risk
missing public quarterly profit projections.
Let's say that organization "X" typically
allocates 20% ($100K) of their $500K annual
human resources budget to recruitment and 25%
($125K) to sick benefit coverage. A coaching
intervention designed to reduce an
out-of-control 50% ($250K) recruitment spend and
an excessively accessed sick benefits program
(35%) to the budgeted figures is well worth an
investment of up to 25% of the expected savings
($50K). If the positive outcome can be
maintained for a number of years, the
expenditure can be justified by lowering the
average projected percentages (20%->15% - 17%
and 25%-> 20%-22%) generating savings forecasts
of 30-50K each year for the next three to five
years. So they've invested $50 to accrue $150.
That's a good ROI.
Reducing people to numbers in a corporate plan
is a de-humanizing experience, not something
that overly humanistic professional trainers can be expected
to enjoy. However, when you look at the
flip-side of the coin, (the human side),
and unearth the misery and dissatisfaction that
is generating the turnover and absenteeism, it's
research that's well worth your time. So what
sorts of issues cause these sorts of problems?
Again, harnessing public market research to
further build your case is an excellent
approach! For example, The Wall Street Journal
reported in a 2002 survey that 82% of people in
the workforce don’t like their jobs – The reason
they don’t like their jobs is primarily because
they are in the WRONG jobs. If they don't like
their jobs they'll engage in job-hopping or
absenteeism.
Jennifer Whitaker, a certified corporate coach
and co-founder of Atlanta's “Institute for
Performance Excellence” explains.
"Employees are not trained well, neither are
bosses. Very few bosses know how to manage or
lead. The typical workplace today doesn’t
empower and value their employees. They retain
people who have long outlived their usefulness.
The biggest problem today is that employees are
not properly aligned with a job that matches
their skill."
"We see this same core issue again and again.
The people who are expected to keep the business
running, the employees, are not given the
training that they need, they’re not properly
appreciated or valued for the potential that
they have. Too many workplaces try to fit the
right people into the wrong role, then overlook
their strengths and get them to work on
improving their weaknesses. This results is
people disengaging from their work and simply
not wanting to show up everyday – it’s too
stressful and difficult!"
A number of coaches that I know have
chosen to shift their focus from individual
coaching relationships with executives within
organizations to corporate coaching. Their
primary motivation was not the lure of big
budgets, but rather, the opportunity to increase
their ability to impact people. A typical
professional coach/client ratio is one coach to
20 or 25 clients. Coaching an organization
changes that ratio significantly. It also
changes the nature of the engagement.
When you work with an organization, you have the
opportunity to gain an excellent understanding
of its issues and long term challenges. You get
the "big picture" in a way that's just not
possible when you're coaching one employee.
This insight enables you to develop strategies
and training programs that will impact hundreds
or thousands of people. It is a project that
will take time to complete, and could employ you
and a number of colleagues for a full year - or
more!
If you're attracted to the "big game" of
providing services to corporations, or even if you prefer to
work with ex-corporate
professionals, (who have been trained to think
in terms of ROI - return on investment) it pays
to be able to quantify the value of your work by translating
its "soft" benefits into a solid and
quantifiable return. |
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