Get to Great News from Mentor Group

Achieving sustainable change in your sales performance

Mentor offers a number of Get to Great™ sales benchmarking models as the basis of one-day, facilitated workshops that ask the question ‘Where are you now, where do you want to be, and by when?’:

1.       Sales Readiness addresses the ‘fundamentals’ of the sales organisation; its strategy, market alignment, competitive position, systems, processes and people.  Implementing the actions agreed to close any gaps identified will deliver significant improvement in all these areas, resulting in improved sales performance and a reduced cost of sale, on an ongoing basis. It is targeted at sales leadership and / or senior sales team members.

2.       Sales Team Effectiveness addresses the ‘application’ of sales readiness by the sales team, individually and collectively, focusing on mindset, attitude, behaviour, capability and accountability. Implementing the actions agreed to close any gaps identified will deliver a step change in all these areas, resulting in a sustainable improvement in sales team performance and morale. It is targeted at sales teams in the broadest sense. 

How does the Get to Great™ process work?

The nominated participants attend a one day workshop, facilitated by experienced Mentor consultants, to:

1. Debate and achieve consensus on the key questions from the chosen model
2. Develop action plans and agree owners and timescales to close the high priority gaps
3. Identify individual capability gaps for review offline, creating personal development plans.

The outputs define the development programme, the delivery method, and the ‘measures of success’ to ensure a sustainable return on investment.   When the action plans and development programme have been successfully completed, the workshop process is repeated to recalibrate the scores and any remaining gaps.

Try Get to Great™ for yourselves

We find that potential customers want to experience Get to Great™ first hand before committing, so we offer a 90 minute in-house taster against two elements of the model of your choice.

Achieving Sales Team Effectiveness in 2010 and beyond...

Do you need your sales team to consistently and effectively achieve its forecasted number?

The challenge is identifying the things that must change to achieve this in a market where price is often the deciding factor; value is hard to define and sell, and the competition become more aggressive by the day.

Mentor has worked with sales teams, large and small, for nearly 20 years, helping them address these challenges and achieve their number, using Get to Great™ Sales Team Effectiveness.

Our unique approach is designed to drive a step change in performance, behaviour and results using facilitated assessment to identify gaps, followed by development that blends virtual and classroom learning with power sessions, observation, development centres or coaching.

How does it work?

The sales team attend a one day workshop, facilitated by experienced Mentor consultants, to:

1. Debate and achieve consensus on the 12 key questions above, collectively and individually
2. Develop action plans to close the high priority team capability gaps identified
3. Identify individual capability gaps for review offline, creating personal development plans.

These outputs define the content and delivery methods for the development programme, and serve to calibrate the ‘measures of success’ to ensure a return on investment.

 

Benefits and Outcomes

Participating clients can expect a sustainable step change in individual and team performance, mindset, behaviour and results in line with the agreed ‘measure of success’. Case studies to demonstrate clear ROI are available on request.

Get to Great News from Mentor Group - Issue One November 2009

Welcome to the first Mentor Get to Great™ News.  Our objective is to keep you informed about what’s happening with Get to Great™, including new models, the people behind them, interesting projects, and other Mentor Group news.

This issue includes news on the Employee Engagement model, the origins of Get to Great™, a recent project in Sao Paulo, and a profile of John Phillips, the man behind the Employee Engagement model.

Get to Great™ News includes the recent launch of the Get to Great™ Employee Engagement model in early September (see below), and the success of our ongoing Breakfast Briefings, which have consistently achieved our objective letting small, intimate groups of interested parties experience the power of Get to Great™ firsthand.  Details of forthcoming events can be found elsewhere under Forthcoming Events, naturally!

Get to Great™ Employee Engagement

Earlier this year the Department for Business Information and Skills commissioned a study by David MacLeod and Nita Clark.  The aim was to examine whether a wider take up of engagement approaches could impact positively on UK competitiveness and performance, and meet the challenges of increased global competition.  Their findings were published in July, and to quote the Rt Hon Lord Mandelson Secretary of State for Business Information and Skill:

“This timely report sets out for the first time the evidence that underpins what we all know intuitively, which is that only organisations that truly engage and inspire their employees produce world class levels of innovation, productivity and performance."

So why did the UK Government spend so much time and money commissioning a report into something that we all knew anyway?  I guess you could say that we all know that fire is very hot, and yet still people burn themselves!  In this lies the real problem, in that business leaders intuitively know having an engaged workforce will deliver superior results, it’s just that they don’t know what to do about it or don’t make the connection between this and the bottom line!

The report recommends a national awareness campaign over the next 8 months to highlight the benefits of engagement with leaders; so that the UK economy comes out of the current economic difficulties ready to meet the challenges of increasing global competition.

With this in mind, Mentor is pleased to announce the arrival of the latest addition to the Get to Great™ family - Employee Engagement. Based on our research and experience of working on employee engagement within organisations of all sizes, we have created an internal benchmarking tool which will help your organisation assess where it is against the known key drivers of engagement, agree a desired state against each, and most importantly, take action to improve them. With multiple options, the approach taken by your organisation will depend on many variables (size, complexity, variety of locations and roles etc).  Benchmarking can be carried out just by a senior team, or alternatively you might wish to include separate focus groups of managers and employees from across the business in order to establish the drivers that are really important to different groups.

The outputs will help your organisation to create its own strategy and approach to continuously improving the work experience for your people, including whether or not to invest money and effort in conducting engagement surveys.  After all, if we know intuitively, why do we ask first and only then act?

The man behind the model!

John Phillips has worked in a variety of organisations, most recently as the Learning & Development Director at Experian, where he was constantly adapting and modifying best practice to fit with the unique needs of each sector.  This has included the development of performance appraisal processes, talent and succession management, the development of organisational and specialist competency frameworks. Most recently he has been focussing on measuring employee engagement, with subsequent global analysis and action planning.   He has operated as a board director responsible for the operation of a vocational training business arm with P&L and business development responsibility.

Stop Press! We are working on delivering Get to Great™ virtually in 2010, using WebEx or a similar platform; more to follow.

The origins of Get to Great™

Get to Great™ can be traced back to 2001, when Chris Whyatt, its creator, was leading a project for Lotus / IBM to improve their bid win ratio.  Chris realised Lotus needed to understand their current capabilities and define their aspirations before he could start to close the agreed gaps.  Taking inspiration from the Capability Maturity Model, Chris built a five-level capability model covering the 12 critical success factors in improving bid capability.  The subsequent project delivered a step change in bid win ratio from around 10% to circa 90%! 

Chris subsequently used the same approach on similar projects for organisations as diverse as SAP, BNFL, Castle Care, HP, Getronics, Adobe, and Davis Langdon, all of which delivered significant step change in bid win ratios.

Upon successful completion of a project for Microsoft in late 2006, Jon Hughes (now with Integralis) suggested that a Sales Readiness model would be the next logical step; this was duly created with input from Jon and his team.  All that was needed was an ‘umbrella’ name to cover the methodology; Chris chose and trademarked Get to Great™ to reflect the nature of the desired outcome of a customer engagement.

Chris and Get to Great™ became part of Mentor Group in late 2008, heralding the creation of several new Business Development and Leadership & Management models, the most recent being Employee Engagement.

Get to Great™ in South America with NEC

NEC in Brazil has traditionally been a hardware led business, so their move into reselling VeriSign Managed Security Services (MSS) required a change in approach. Jack Delmonte, Global Channel Director for Enterprise Security Services at VeriSign asked us to help facilitate that change, using Get to Great™ as the catalyst.

“I saw Get to Great™ as a great vehicle for helping us to work with NEC to take MSS to market in this important region for us, and the two days we spent together proved me right.”

The Mentor team of Chris Norton and Chris Whyatt spent the first half day getting to know the NEC stakeholders, led by Pedro Mouradian, gathering background information on their business and their market.  The second day was a Get to Great™ workshop with Pedro and his 10 man team, looking at everything from how well they understood their market, through the sales process, to how well ‘success’ was defined, communicated, measured and understood.  The final day was spent developing action plans to close the high priority gaps and debriefing the main stakeholders.  Perhaps the most interesting dynamic was language, which included slides and discussions in Portuguese! 

In terms of outcomes, back to Jack Delmonte:

“Due to the self assessment nature of Get to Great™ and the independent facilitation, we were able to get to the heart of the matter with virtually no pain, working through actions to resolve issues quickly and effectively.  We immediately noticed an improvement in all aspects of our relationship with NEC, as well as an upturn in results, which is always good news.”

Pedro Mouradian, NEC Services Solutions Business Unit Manager, commented:

“Jack had given me an outline of what Get to Great™ was about, but the experience of holding the workshop has given us greater pipeline integrity and won business, so I am happy with the outcomes and hope that we can continue to benefit as we execute on the agreed actions.  The two Chris’s adapted well to our culture and our business, adding a lot of value over 2 days.”

Pedro Mouradian and Chris Norton with a copy of Bare Knuckle Customer Service, co-authored by Chris Norton and Simon Hazeldine, a Senior Consultant at Mentor Group.

The book itself, available from any good bookshop or Amazon, naturally!

Forthcoming Events include a number of Leadership and Sales Readiness Breakfast Briefings:

• 19th November and 25th November in London (08.45 to 10.15)
• 20^th November, 8^th December and 19^th January in Bracknell (08.15 to 10.00)

Each delegate will experience the power of Get to Great™ by benchmarking their organisations against 3 elements of each model.  If you would like to join us please call 01582 842007 or email gettogreat@mentorgroup.co.uk.