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From Strategy to Action to Results: Topics that deliver
The following represents a current list of our most requested topics. Each topic presents research based, practical ideas for taking your leaders or sales professionals to the next level.
Unlike typical off-the-shelf content, each topic will be customized to reflect your unique culture, challenges and opportunities.
Available topics include:
The Mind of the Customer
How the world's leading sales forces accelerate their customers' success
What does sales success require today?
Two generations ago, success in sales depended on personal relationships. In the 70's and 80's, success in sales depended on product knowledge and expertise. In the 90's, it depended on the ability to bundle capabilities into solutions that met customer needs.
Today, the need for all those skills has not gone away; they're just not enough anymore.
Due to escalating customer expectations and a tough competitive environment, success in selling today requires an evolution from a sales force that communicates the value of its offerings to one that must individually and collectively add value during the entire sales process. The sales force that is better equipped to understand its customer's business and accelerate their customer's success is the next generation of professional selling.
As the rules of the game change, new kinds of sales professionals, sales managers and sales leaders are emerging. And the results are astounding. In this brave new sales world, a handful of companies already excel.
In this interactive presentation, we will explore the four ways those companies - leaders like UPS, Toyota, Nokia and others - behave differently than their peers and achieve business results. These strategies will be presented in practical, actionable terms and will be illustrated by the use of actual examples and approaches that cross the bridge from theory to practice.
The Winning Edge
Personal Strategies for Lasting Success
Got change? Who doesn't! The next few years will see more changes in the business world than have taken place in the last ten. Success and growth will belong to those organizations and individuals that are ready for the changes. Flexibility - in skills, attitude and know-how - will help you ride the next wave.
Based on current research and over twenty years of management experiences, this presentation focuses on the best practices, innovative techniques and state of the art customer strategies that have helped leading organizations achieve extraordinary results. This upbeat and interactive presentation will provide your audience with the capabilities they require for lasting success and impact!
World Class Sales Research
In 1994, The HR Chally Group partnered with The American Quality and Productivity Center to identify the first World Class Sales Benchmarking Standards. Fortune 500 companies including Alcoa, Mead, Johnson & Johnson, Northern Telecom and Steelcase funded the research. Through 2002 Chally has continued the research with the additional funding of 25 corporations now including AT&T, General Motors, Exxon, Pepsi-Cola and UPS, among others. To date Chally has interviewed over 60,000 business decision-makers, collected competitive ratings and rankings of over 7,200 sales forces, correlated sales processes with performance results and found clear criteria for success against competitors. The results:
When literally thousands of business decision-makers are asked to rate sales performance and identify which sales forces are World Class, the results do not match the opinions of consultants and the popular business press!
Benchmarking the real World Class Sales Performers leads to some surprises. The good news: the "Best of the Best" shared at least six of the eight most important "benchmark" processes.
Best time allotment 1:45
Coveylink Topics
CoveyLink offers the following as keynote addresses, half-day retreats, or full-day workshops to audiences around the world:
- Business at the Speed of Trust™
- Leading at the Speed of Trust™
- Teambuilding at the Speed of Trust™
- 13 Behaviors of High Trust Leaders
- Beyond Compliance: An Inside Out Approach to High Trust Leadership
Accordence, Inc. Topics
- Speaker:
Grande Lum, Managing Director Accordence, Inc.
Grande Lum, Accordence Managing Director, brings your audience the result of decades of research and experience with leading organizations around the issues of negotiation, influence and conflict resolution. A key individual skill and broad organizational strategy whose importance is increasing, negotiation, has a dramatic, daily impact on your company’s bottom line. Influence and conflict resolution are critical skills for maximum productivity. The following presentations offer research-based best practices, approaches, and tools—and the kinds of thought-provoking philosophy, personal connections, and engaging real world client stories that only Accordence can deliver. Whether you need a keynote address, retreat presentation, sales kickoff, or learning workshop, choose the topic that best fits your need. Then contact Accordence so we can add unique value designed for your specific audience.
How to Negotiate on Value Without Making Concessions
Much of traditional sales thinking holds that negotiation is primarily about reaching final agreement on price and terms. And that getting to that final agreement requires a combination of haggling, conceding, and discounting. Yet seasoned sales executives know that haggling on price and terms can be a costly tactical and strategic error. Making too many concessions can actually hurt our most valuable customer relationships. Clients can start becoming difficult simply in order to hold out for deeper discounts. Worse, agreement discounts that are all over the map often reduce profitability without a commensurate gain in market share or other strategic goals.
In this presentation, Accordence reveals how to negotiate on value without making concessions. This robust view of negotiation shows that it is something we do throughout—and beyond—the sales cycle. We are negotiating from the moment we speak with a prospect, through the close of a deal, and far beyond. While we negotiate major contracts several times a year, we are negotiating every day as part of the sales process. Setting aside the traditional perception of negotiation, then, it becomes clear that we are not simply negotiating contract price and terms. Nearly everything is negotiated; persuasion and influence are being used all the time.
Since sales and negotiation are, in this sense, a seamless process—how can salespeople stay focused on delivering value and avoid concession pitfalls? Accordence has developed a strategic negotiation framework, based on research from numerous fields over many decades, that addresses this need. The negotiation framework gives salespeople an increased awareness of the sources of value in negotiation. Salespeople use it to make proactive choices while continually building collaborative working relationships, and to guide their entire negotiation strategy with each client. If the goal is to maximize the value of client relationships, the outdated idea of "haggle, concede, and discount" must be set aside in favor of strategic processes that help every negotiation deliver a positive outcome.
How to "Expand The Pie" for Successful Internal Negotiations
Reaching agreements with colleagues, suppliers, or other internal resources with whom we must collaborate requires a special mindset. In these situations, the focus must not be on number of negotiating "wins", but rather on joint problem solving that incorporates all parties' needs and concerns. Accordance calls this mindset "Expanding the Pie."
This presentation shows how "expanding the pie" creates as large a set of positive outcomes as possible for all parties involved. As our research and work with clients over several decades has proven, the core of this mindset is moving away from confrontation and toward collaboration. Expanding the Pie is based on a proven Accordence negotiating framework of tools and strategies for developing the kind of collaborative negotiations that deliver the most long-term value. The framework focuses on four essential components — Interests, Criteria, Options, and No-Agreement Alternatives. These tools help people create the kinds of collaborative internal relationships they know intuitively will be most beneficial—by fostering creativity and trust, developing consensus in spite of conflicting views, and other proven tactics. The result: strengthened relationships both inside and outside your organization, and all parties better able to negotiate future agreements more effectively.
Find out more about creating successful internal negotiations in The Negotiation Fieldbook (McGraw-Hill), by Grande Lum.
To Counter Hardball Negotiation Tactics, Change the Game!
Some negotiators pride themselves on knowing just how to push your buttons. This hardball, adversarial approach is intentional and meant to put you on the defensive. How can you minimize the impact of such tactics? Fundamentally, you have to "change the game."
This presentation tells you how, by providing strategies that effectively stop, reframe, relax, or restart the game so that hardball tactics lose their punch. You'll hear how successful negotiators in companies like yours use strategies that:
- stop the presses: halt the negotiation and powerfully voice your concerns "in the moment"
- ignore it: nothing disarms an adversary bent on conflict better than an unshakable positive attitude
- come back to the issue: table the irritant for later, which both allows time to process the issue or insult and deflates its immediate impact
- ask that person for advice: diffuse the adversarial environment by switching to a partnering mode and inviting ideas for moving forward more effectively
- enlist support: find others to help, either as part of your team, as a non-partisan facilitator, etc.
- use appropriate humor: when used well, humor can instantly change the dynamic and turn around a bad situation
- leave the game: exit the situation and analyze your best alternative
In order to use these strategies well, we also provide tips for preparing for difficult situations ahead of time. These include understanding your own "hot buttons," considering what the other party might really be trying to accomplish, and—above all—keeping your eye on the negotiation prize.
How Do People Really Achieve Win-Win?
Ever wondered how some negotiations embody a "win-win" throughout the process? How some negotiators consistently increase value for all parties? What process these negotiation experts use, and how they learned about it? Many organizations come to us asking these questions. Time after time, they say they're weary of having to choose between caving in and sacrificing relationships in their most critical negotiations. They want a simple, useful framework that will help them prepare for and engage in "win-win" negotiations—the kind that increase value for all parties.
This presentation shows you how we help those clients, using a proven process that will achieve the same strategic results in your organization. It is based on the win-win philosophy embodied by Accordence's ICON Negotiation Framework for preparing, conducting, and reviewing negotiations. ICON stems from an increased awareness of the sources of value in negotiation. It gives people the ability to think strategically about negotiation and make proactive choices while continually building collaborative working relationships. In addition to tools for understanding and planning the different phases of a negotiation, ICON delivers ways to generate innovative solutions to challenging relationship. It teaches techniques for negotiating outcomes that meet strategic goals. And, most importantly, it enhances people's ability to start, sustain, and repair critical business relationships
Accordence clients use ICON for mundane as well as exceptional negotiations. It frees experienced and novice negotiators alike from becoming bogged down in process problems, so they can devote their energies to coming up with imaginative and practical solutions. People often report that the ICON framework is what permits them to finally think strategically about negotiation choices. For them, ICON makes principled negotiation an accessible and practical alternative — and a way to achieve win-win results in every negotiation for the first time in their professional lives.
The Power of 3: Persuasion Without Coercion
Many people say they relish the "dog eat dog" mentality of today's business world. But coercion is neither an effective nor a secure tactic. Fairness is. This presentation helps you focus on and utilize fairness in order to improve influence and overall work relationships.
To apply principles of fairness, consider that people become more successful persuaders and influencers by applying three different perspectives to issues they face. These mindsets through which we "see" the world, which Accordence calls The Power of 3, are: First Person (advocating one's own needs), Second Person (acknowledging others' point of view), and Third Person (observing objectively to seek what is reasonable and fair). Research shows that people who are most effective at resolving differences are adept at viewing the world from all three.
These perspectives open up your viewpoint. But there are still many other aspects to replacing coercion with fairness. For example, creating fair solutions with objectivity requires both parties to agree up front on what is "objective." Being open to persuasion during the negotiation fosters also fairness by acknowledging that the other party is making sense. At the end of the negotiation, each person must be equipped to justify the end agreement to others (a boss, a colleague), which is another dimension of fairness.
But what if, despite your sense of fair play, the other party still insists on embracing the "dog eat dog" model? Can you still "win" if the other side doesn't value fairness? The answer is yes. Our work has proven that employing The Power of 3 and basic tenants of fairness enable you to build consensus in spite of differing views, and make better choices when faced with opposition. The bottom line is that fairness—not coercion—will help you influence effectively and strengthen all relationships in your organization.
Constructive Conflict Resolution
Resolving conflicts is not as intuitive as many people think. Accordence's work with leading organizations over many decades has shown that the most successful conflict resolution is based on constructive – not destructive – concepts. To apply those concepts effectively in the workplace requires much more than intuition – it requires a systematic, proven approach.
The presentation reveals this approach, which has helped people at all levels and from all organizational areas resolve workplace conflicts. The key success factor is an understanding that resolving conflict is really joint problem solving, and it requires understanding all other parties' needs and concerns. With this initial understanding, applying appropriate communication and relationship skills becomes much easier. Accordence has helped thousands of individuals develop the skills to resolve workplace conflicts they face every day. Our proven approach is based on Three Influence Perspectives, a concept rooted in philosophy and psychological research that describes three mindsets through which we "see" the world.
One of the greatest benefits of applying this systematic approach to conflict resolution is that people are able to remove conflict-driven barriers to operating efficiency, productivity, and morale as soon as they arise. In today's high-velocity business environment, removing obstacles quickly is paramount. This is just one example of the broad organizational benefits derived when people have the skills to resolve conflicts in a constructive manner. This is one strategic area that successful organizations must not overlook.
It's Me Not You: Harnessing Your Communication Power
Many people know intellectually how to communicate in ways that manage conflict, but something is holding them back. They erect their own communication barriers. They instinctively blame the other. At the same time, other people are able to transform horrendous conflicts into clear communication by using simple methods. What's different about these two groups?
This presentation proposes that the difference is taking the attitude, "it's me, not you" rather than always assuming it's somebody else's fault that communication seems botched. We show how taking responsibility for one's own communication—rather than blaming the other—is a key success strategy for both individuals/teams and organizations. We offer a collection of ideas and simple approaches for enhancing critical communications that will provoke, challenge, and inspire.
Learning how to move away from the habit of blame begins by understanding what's really going on when communication falters. We all have hit invisible walls, when neither party can move forward no matter what each says. The bricks in these walls are anger, fear, anxiety, blaming, and hostility. Sharing examples of people, issues, and situations that vary dramatically, this presentation reveals the things people do to break through the walls. Many are strikingly similar. Most—such as eliminating distrust, facing fears with a learned helpfulness, and shifting away from victimization—are often overlooked. All have accountability at their core, and successful collaboration as their outcome. By identifying approaches such as these, we help you access the ways that people already communicate collaboratively, and open up new pathways to do so more consciously and effectively.
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Speakers Bureau