In today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business world where there are not enough hours in the day to even come close to accomplishing our goals and objectives, the question of how much time leaders should devote to talent development is a continuous challenge that is impacting short and long term business performance.
Read More >Robert Brodo
Recent Posts
“I’ve Never Felt More Incompetent…and LOVED it!”
At the conclusion of a recent High Potential Leader learning journey experienced by a group of future pharmaceutical industry leaders, participants were asked to pause and reflect on their key learnings and how their experience will have impact and future impact on their performance. This particular learning journey was an integration of Business Acumen skills development and Business Leadership skill development wrapped around a complex global pharmaceutical industry business simulation.
As we come to the end of 2016 and start the business planning process for 2017 and beyond, business leaders around the world are going through a multitude of a strategic planning meetings where they are assessing where there are now, where are they going, and how they are they going to get there. Reviewing learnings from other successful and not-so-successful organizations should be part of every business planning review process. There are many organizations feeling strong and secure in their market positions and this blog is written for you with a warning; don’t get too secure! For organizations that currently maintain strong market positions, there are very good business lessons to be learned from the fall of Nokia’s smartphone marketplace dominance. As the graphic below illustrates in the second quarter of 2007, Nokia owned more than 50% of the global market share of smartphones. Today, it is a number that is hard to comprehend. By the end of the second quarter of 2013 - just 6 years later - Nokia’s market share declined to almost zero. It is shocking data which should be recognized and absorbed by business leaders so they can avoid the same mistakes Nokia did.
Are our Future Leaders Hungry Enough?
“You can have all of this value for an awesome price!”
“Compared to our competition, I’m offering you a really low price”
“We just launched this new product at an outrageously low initial price!”
As part of Advantexe’s work in the area of Strategic Business Selling, we have the opportunity to work with many different types of sales professionals ranging from high-tech sales to managed care pharmaceuticals sales. Recently, I have noticed a disturbing trend where sales professionals have been “adjectifying” price in their conversations with customers. As we all know, price is often a primary driver of decision making for most customers; however, there is something called the value dashboard that a customer uses to make a final decision and the other elements of the value dashboard beyond price play a part in the entire value proposition. Levels of service, product quality, product availability, brand, are just a few of the other possible elements of the value dashboard. The issue here is that by focusing too much on price by placing a strong adjective in front of it, you are separating price even further away from the other elements of the value dashboard which make the full value proposition.
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