DataDome Blog

We are pleased to bring back our workshop – Reinvention I: An Introduction. This workshop is designed to help you prepare for making some big decisions in your life: choosing your career path, determining which track is right for you, whether that track is a road of self-employment, entrepreneurship, or working within the corporate world. To make those choices requires information about yourself, your skills, behaviors and motivations.

TTI Trainer of the Year, Art Schoeck will be teaching you about the types of information that are essential to know before making critical choices about your future.  This breakfast session will be held at the Buckhead Club on December 9th, 7:30am – 9:30am. Click here for more information and to register for Reinvention I: An Introduction.

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One of the most pivotal times in the development of a business is that moment when the entrepreneur chooses to go to the next level: to build an organization. It is a time to remember that many of the habits that were so beneficial initially – pioneering, big-picture thinking, risk-taking, forging ahead no matter the obstacles, doing anything and everything it takes to make it go – may now need to be balanced by other skills and energies to create an effective and successful team.

Stepping back and adjusting focus on making the right hires, however, could be an uncomfortable change of pace from the forging ahead full steam pattern you’ve been living. Your pioneering ways may have gotten you off the ground, but it is a strong team that will take you further, and to build one you must recognize that interviewing, training, and developing relationships will take time and effort.

The key to growth is defining who you really need and then finding them, hiring, them and keeping them. But there are pitfalls everywhere. Too often, when first expanding, entrepreneurs will set out to find copies of themselves: persons as energetic, dynamic, willing and risk-taking as they are. They might be duplicating their strengths, but they are then not compensating for their weaknesses.

It is easy to understand the tendency to hire people like yourself: you communicate easier, you tend to motivate similarly, but it can be a trap. Your business needs are not satisfied by duplicating yourself, but rather by complementing your skills and behaviors – a pattern that has worked well for “Yin and Yang” pairs like Bernard Marcus & Arthur Blank, William Hewlett & Dave Packard, Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak – different styles bringing different strengths together to grow their companies from humble beginnings.

Take the time needed to define each position on your new team. No skimping. Strategic planning is useless if you don’t find the right people to execute your gameplan. Finding people with the technical skills is relatively easy: resume, references, etc. The soft skills are a different matter, and are actually more important.

There are great tools available today to match the soft skills of the person with the soft skills appropriate for the job. You can go a step further and motivate each new member of your team by identifying their passions in life; their values, and making sure that between their work and time away from work, they can fulfill those passions.

It takes time to find the right people, more time to train them, and even more time to listen to, adjust and motivate them; but, the rewards are unparalleled. So often the new entrepreneur takes too long to realize that simple replication is not a growth plan, control tactics work only in the short term, and turnover just plain hurts. Performance and productivity are greatly enhanced only when the entrepreneur lets go of one-style “do as I do” thinking and changes to a focus on building teams of complementary behaviors.

Remember: people are the number one resource of a company.

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Busy professionals with a strong desire to achieve sometimes fall into slumps, which can destroy creative drive. Do your best to avoid these slumps by accepting that you cannot do everything. Delegate responsibilities to others qualified to perform the task. They should share your goals for success.

• Be a lifetime learner. Don’t assume you’ve learned all you need to know. Have a plan for personal growth and work on challenging goals in all areas of your life.
• Be proactive. Solve problems before they occur. Carefully plan procedures to prevent problems and proper handling in the event they do happen.
• Communicate your goals. Let others know how they can help you achieve them. Listen carefully to information they provide you.

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Real leadership inspires voluntary commitment, not just grudging compliance. Here are a few tips for dealing with stress behaviors.

1. Identify and be aware of your own stress behaviors. Don’t contribute to the problem.
2. Acknowledge the stress behavior. We all have rough days – give the benefit of the doubt.
3. Avoid “pushing the behavioral style buttons” of a person exhibiting stress behavior (see above).
4. Adapt your own behavioral style to that of others, with behaviors that meet the needs of those you lead. Don’t lead like you would want to be led. Lead like they want to be led.
5. Identify elements in the work environment that can be adjusted to minimize style-based stress sources.

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Your blood pressure is up and profits are down. Don’t your managers and salespeople get it? Are you the only one who sees the big picture?

The problem might be that you need to better understand your top performers so that you can use your entire team more effectively.

“You don’t compete with products alone anymore, but how well you use your people”, a manager tells Daniel Goleman in Working with Emotional Intelligence. Higher profits and higher revenues will depend on a new kind and level of productivity.

How important is it to understand what top performers have that average and low performers don’t?

For front line jobs, those in the top 1 percent produced three times more output than those in the bottom 1 percent.

For jobs such as professional salespeople, account managers, and executives, those in the top 1 percent produced 127 percent more than the average performer.

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Data Dome and Alignment at Work, Inc. are once again teaming up to deliver our popular Align to Thrive workshop.

This session, which will be held on October 6th, will show you strategies that, despite the uncertainty of economic and market conditions, can help strengthen businesses and increase profitability.

Organizational Alignment is an empowering concept for realizing full business potential. An aligned organization is a fine-tuned machine driving forward with focus, discipline and responsiveness to customer values.

In this workshop, through theory and practical application, you will learn new tools to measure and achieve organizational alignment. Simple, intuitive and quantitative measurements can show you how well your organization is aligned to your customers? and employees? constantly changing needs. This is the vital data needed to make the critical decisions for success.

You can find more detailed information and request your seat by visiting http://www.datadome.com/align2thrive.php or calling 404-814-0739.

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In response to the current climate we’ve put together a new series to help you align yourself with the right career path.  These workshops will give you the tools to help you decide if you should pursue a corporate career and which one, or if you are better suited to entrepreneurship and what paths you might take there.

In addition to the group sessions, each participant will be eligible for a free one-on-one consultation with TTI Trainer of the Year, Arthur Schoeck.

Three workshops that build on each other:

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They can talk…but can they sell?

Many more can talk than can sell. Did you ever hire someone because they sounded so great – presented so well – you thought they could do anything? But six months later, you’re tired of hearing how great they sound, you just want some results?

Why? What went wrong? To answer completely, there are two areas that need to be addressed:

• Behavioral Style
• Knowledge of Selling

Behavioral style refers to the behavioral elements of selling a particular product for a particular company to a particular client base. These elements include:

• aggressiveness
• cold-call reluctance
• extroversion
• multi-tasking
• rules compliance
• natural enthusiasm
• self starting tendencies
• servicing
• paperwork
• tendency to detail
• product information
• customer relations
• consistency
• follow-up and follow-through
• tendency to listen.

It takes a very different style to sell computer parts directly to computer engineers than it does to sell computers to the general public. Similarly, to close the sale to a low-key, easy-going, family-oriented type
buyer requires considerably different style than closing the same merchandise to a fast-talking, hurried, bottom-line oriented buyer.

By analyzing what you’re selling, who you are selling for, and who you are selling to, a company today can articulate the customized behaviors optimum for their situation. Salespeople can then be hired whose natural behaviors are ideally what you are looking for. Those salespeople who are not exactly ‘natural’ in these behaviors will nevertheless benefit tremendously from understanding just what behaviors are best to role-play, or emulate, to excel for your company.

Knowledge of Selling is totally different than one’s behavioral selling style. You may have the right personality style – the right mix of extroversion, aggressiveness, empathy, etc. – but do you know what to do and say in the selling cycle: when to ask for the close, when to remain silent, what strategy to use, and when to use it.

Most sales training programs, in effect, give technical training, but very little in the art of selling. Likewise, the tools for measuring these Sales Skills are different. What are the best things to do and when?

These elements include how to:

• Prospect
• Qualify
• Probe
• Impress
• Demonstrate
• Influence
• Close

Make Adjustments: To communicate more effectively with a customer, you may be required to adjust your natural behavioral style. These adjustments may cause stress or require additional energy. “Pumping up” to get more motivated and enthusiastic than one normally feels requires focus and energy.

On the other hand, stress occurs when the results-driven aggressive salesperson has to slow down, listen more and show patience to slower-reacting people. That is why sales knowledge – knowing exactly what to do – is extremely helpful to minimize the extra stress or energy required to adjust behavioral style. Advantages include shortening the sales cycle, reducing stress and closing sales more often!

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We’ve been listening to your feedback and so, by popular demand, Data Dome and Alignment at Work, Inc. are once again teaming up to deliver Align to Thrive.

This workshop, which will be held on August 25th, will show you strategies designed to strengthen businesses and increase profitability… despite the uncertainty of economic and market conditions.

Organizational Alignment is an empowering concept for realizing full business potential.  An aligned organization is a fine-tuned machine driving forward with focus, discipline and responsiveness to customer values.

In this workshop, through theory and practical application, you will learn new tools to measure and achieve organizational alignment. Simple, intuitive and quantitative measurements can show you how well your organization is aligned to your customers? and employees? constantly changing needs. This is the vital data needed to make the critical decisions for success.

You can find more detailed information and request your seat by visiting http://www.datadome.com/align2thrive.php or calling 404-814-0739.

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Data Dome and Alignment at Work, Inc. are teaming up to deliver a special workshop called Align to Thrive.

This workshop, which will be held on April 21 and again on April 22, will show you strategies designed to strengthen businesses and increase profitability… despite the uncertainty of economic and market conditions.

Organizational Alignment is an empowering concept for realizing full business potential.  An aligned organization is a fine-tuned machine driving forward with focus, discipline and responsiveness to customer values.

In this workshop, through theory and practical application, you will learn new tools to measure and achieve organizational alignment. Simple, intuitive and quantitative measurements can show you how well your organization is aligned to your customers? and employees? constantly changing needs. This is the vital data needed to make the critical decisions for success.

You can find more detailed information and request your seat by visiting http://www.datadome.com/align2thrive.php or calling 404-814-0739.

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