Articles of Interest
Up one levelOur articles and papers represent a summary of all that we’ve learned through our experience, through research, and from our clients. We use them as guideposts for how we create our offerings. Each one represents our thought-leadership in a particular area.
A-Z Articles Index
A listing of links to the PDF versions of the Articles of Interest relating to Leadership, Sales, Individual Effectiveness, HR & Training and links to external Professional Organisations.
AITD
AITD features Wilson Learning's groundbreaking report on multiple methods for effective learning by Dr. Michael Leimbach, Feb 2009
Blended Learning
Blended learning represents a powerful new way for organisations to train their workforces. But a significant challenge remains: How do you make blended learning more about performance improvement and less about learning?
CEO Online
Wilson Learning is a regular contributor to CEO online. CEO Online is a 24/7 global centre of learning, with an expansive research library, providing the latest in management development and thought leadership from around the world.
Creating Real Differentiation
To avoid the pitfalls of competing onprice, salespeople are often told they need to “sell the value.” Another strategy is to “value-add,” by offering the customer extra services or product features without charge. While these strategies can be effective short-term, neither of these approaches produces a sustainable advantage.
Engagement
We’ve all heard about organisations with great strategies that somehow fail to execute in the marketplace. We also know of organisations that have long-term, highly satisfied customers who, for some mysterious reason, stop buying.
Extended Learning
Research indicates that only a fraction of learning is used back on the job. Developing an integrated system to extend learning can boost performance and achieve long-term results in the process.
Good Business
“Your price is too high.” “Can you match the price your competitor is offering?” “We need to have that service included in your price.” How do your salespeople respond when they hear these kinds of statements from customers?
Leading for Sales Performance
Would you ask the best violinist in the orchestra to take over conducting without any preparation to be a conductor? Probably not. And if you did, you wouldn’t have very high expectations for the orchestra’s performance. Yet this is exactly what most organisations do. They promote high-performing salespeople into management roles without preparing them to be confident and competent in the critical areas of coaching, motivating, and developing their people.
Leading Virtual Teams
In a market fraught with uncertainty, many companies have focused on cutting expenses and increasing productivity and efficiency as a way to stem market share losses and reverse downward sales trends. This often means downsizing and reorganising to reduce labour costs, eliminate redundancy, and better target scarce resources. In the process, offices have been closed, divisions and departments merged, employees dispersed, and leaders challenged to manage wider spans of control—often covering multiple locations.
Protecting Existing Business
In a challenging economic climate, you may be finding that prospective customers are strongly focused on downsizing and cost cutting rather than on expanding their business or acquiring the latest new product features. Companies that may have been in growth mode last year are putting projects on hold, reducing capital budgets, and paying renewed attention to cash management.
Strong Business Relationships
Whatever your industry, your customers are most likely delaying projects and looking for ways to cut costs. At the same time, it is becoming more challenging to develop new business as companies scale back expenditures and use competitive bidding processes to get better deals from suppliers.
Targeted Prospecting
If yours is like a lot of sales organisations, you may have intensified prospecting efforts lately as old customers downsized, cut spending, and in some cases went out of business altogether. The problem is that prospecting is often timeconsuming, costly, wasteful, and hard on the morale of the sales team.
Versatile Communication
How has your organisation responded to falling consumer demand and slower sales in the current economic climate? If yours is like most, you’ve probably experienced a variety of cost cutting measures; layoffs, downsizing, restructuring and reorganisation, and hiring and pay freezes.
Virtual Teams
As companies search for more productive and more cost effective ways of getting work accomplished, there has been an explosion of virtual work and project teams. As a result, it has become imperative for people to learn how to work together across boundaries of space, time, and yes, cultures.
