Let’s see where we are with our “formula” for business success:

- Revenue and profit require customer loyalty;

- Customer loyalty requires delivery of a differentiated experience;

- Delivery of a differentiated customer experience requires our people to have the set of behaviors and skills customers want.

If our customers value innovation, we need informed; pro-active; solutions-oriented people communicating with our customers. If they value service, skills around responsiveness; issue resolution; and empathy may be a more important focus. Since we can’t be “all things to all people”, the good news is this: among all the activities and behaviors that make up what we “do” everyday – only a finite set have a measureable impact on the ability to deliver on a customer-centric focus:

Two specific activities / behaviors account for a nearly 4X improvement in sales rep performance (Industrial Controls, 2008)

The trick, of course, is identifying what these finite set of activities and behaviors are for YOUR business and then recruiting to these skills and training to them. So, let’s explore a Five Step process to get there.

1. Identify the competencies required for success: there are 3 places to look for traits predictive of success:
   1. Ask your customers. This is the most important – as anything else risks having too subjective of an internal lens. Besides, it’s just common sense: you want to know what customers value, ask them.
   2. Look at what’s already working in your company. Identify your top performers, and focus in on what they are doing that’s uniquely different from your core and bottom performers.
   3. Look at what’s working elsewhere. There may be some best practices for how to execute on what your customers are seeking that someone else has already figured out. Since you’re looking for best practices around a behavior, you don’t even have to benchmark people in your own industry. Disney has a whole university based on the concept that “Customer Service” skills can be transferable across industries.
2. Assess your current workforce against your newly minted, and customer-validated, competency model. What is the current competency level, by individual and competency area?
3. Identify common gap areas across the organization, and define training content to address the most common and impactful gaps. To really improve the relevance and impact of training, build scenarios into the training content around your mentors and top performers.
4. Identify “coaching groups”. For example, your strongest assessment results and strong current performers may be in a coaching group of “mentors”. Your strong assessment finishers whose current results may be a little lower could be your “high potentials”.       Define strategic development plans for the groups, and sustain the model by incorporating the results into Development Plans at the individual level.
5. Measure the Impact. For certain, we want to know the training and development efforts are driving economic results for the organization. As a first step, we need to monitor on-the-job performance impact (can we apply what we learned). Then, we can correlate the assessment results to economic results --- quantifying the impact of improving these competencies on the company’s economic indicators.

Does your company need to improve skills and training for customer-facing employees?

Ask yourself:

1. Do 20% of your salespeople deliver 80% of your revenue? [If so, there may be leverage-able skills and behaviors you can emulate to increase total effectiveness]
2. Can you validate a performance difference (in terms of economic results) between those who have received training and those who haven’t? [If not, how do you know your training spend is providing an ROI?]
3. Do your customers provide “Zone of Affection” loyalty scores and reward you with share of wallet and their retention? [If not, what are they missing in their experience with you that could be improved with training?]