What have you found to be helpful in terms of sales or training?

Hank Harris shares some tips in the Consulting Conversations installment.

The three things that come to mind on that-- by far the first thing that I think is the most important -- is that this sales process is well managed. If it's well managed, training will organically occur in the management process. For some companies, that is so important, and they're so good at it that it's a blinding statement of the obvious.

I happen to deal with many companies where I'm almost amazed at how loose the management is of business development. And frankly, it's not done well, and that happens to be the environment that I came from.

In terms of the specifics of the training, there are a couple of subsets that I think are useful, and certainly, role-playing is a helpful thing. I also believe that these behavioral and sometimes psychological profile-type instruments can be useful. People get a kick out of them, and they're fun, but they can really be useful in people understanding, in a very simple way, how they are, how their customers are, and how their resulting interface is. And so I think there's some value to those things as well.

So, consultants can bring something to bear on that as well.

We'd love to hear from any private business hunt owner in North Carolina who thinks we could help them understand how their business gets better or where it might go in the future.