The caliber of an employer’s learning ecosystem can be the catalyst for breakthroughs in training, upskilling, reskilling and career pathing—or an impediment to it all. Absent the state of the art in thinking and software for learning on the job, organizations struggle to set goals for their people or have an effective impact on overall internal culture. So learning has always been incredibly important in the workplace, and the proliferation of work-from-home (WFH), work-from-anywhere (WFA), hybrid work, and more has only laid bare and underscored this importance. More than ever, organizations must lean heavily on their learning ecosystems—the learning management system (LMS), the content feeding it, and anything else involved. The all-important employee experience hangs in the balance. What You Need to Know About This […]
Continue reading3Sixty Insights and Sales Conservatory Announce Strategic Partnership, Enhancing the Expansion of Research to Sales and Sales Enablement
BOSTON, October 28, 2022 – 3Sixty Insights and Sales Conservatory jointly announced today the formation of a strategic partnership. Enhancing research and consulting capabilities in sales and sales enablement for 3Sixty Insights, the partnership creates additional consulting offerings around sales and sales enablement to its loyal client base. “We have long admired 3Sixty’s commitment to quality research,” said Dr. Tom Tonkin, CEO of Sales Conservatory. “We are proud to bring our sales and sales enablement expertise to their team and their clients.” The partnership empowers both organizations to offer well-researched consulting solutions to a dynamic array of industry partners and clients. From a conceptual standpoint, this newly launched Sales Readiness & Enablement practice area contends that sales force evaluation is the epicenter from which all […]
Continue readingWhen Is a Software Company Not a Software Company?
From the newswire: Atos shareholder calls for chairman to resign. On paper and from a certain perspective, Atos’ business focus sounds great—among many other things, they’re a Platinum SAP partner, with lots of products and services to sell, and a ton of big-name customers. But peel back a layer or two… Years ago, when DBS (Dun & Bradstreet Software, and, yes, I go back that far) started their own consulting arm, a very wise man observed to me that you can’t sell both software and services—your focus and your bottom line have to be one or the other. Sure, you can dabble across the fence for fun and profit in support of your primary business. However, get lost in what looks like all that green […]
Continue readingResearch Note: DiSC Profiles Do Not Affect Sales Performance
What You Need to Know The sales profession is rife with psychometric models that profess to identify and measure various personality traits supposedly advantageous to success in sales. Many of the most popular fall short of their claims. This research note delves deeply into two experiments testing fundamental hypotheses implicit in DiSC, one such personality test. What Is DiSC? In case you are unfamiliar with the DiSC assessment tool, here is a brief description: “DiSC is a personal assessment tool used by more than one million people every year to help improve teamwork, communication, and productivity in the workplace.” The DiSC acronym stands for: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance. Disproving the Utility of DiSC Regarding sales skills, DiSC purports to aid sales professionals by helping them […]
Continue readingThe Bo & Luke Show Guest Podcast: How To Get 3X More Sales in 2022 with Tom Tonkin
About the Episode: In his 25 years of business and technology experience, Tom has served as an executive in both Professional Services and Software Sales. He currently holds the position Senior Principal at Change Management & Transformation where he provides thought leadership for companies on how to improve their sales processes while also serving as CEO/Co-Founder at The Sales Conservatory (TSC), which helps leaders increase revenue through sales enablement efforts like efficient or effective strategies; all this is done with a focus towards helping clients become more mindful about changing landscape changes that will soon come upon them due not only economic turmoil but population aging too! Listen to the full The Bo & Luke Show™ Podcast here: #101 – S4E11 – How To Get […]
Continue readingFor Insight Into Why a Company Might Be Failing, Look Beyond the Numbers
It never ceases to amaze me that when a business begins to fail, its leaders inevitably turn to the numbers. Don’t get me wrong: Numbers are certainly important. But focus too much on them, and you’ll be doomed to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Sears and other giants of yesteryear. It’s no secret that the recent pandemic and its lingering economic impacts have left their collective imprints on people and businesses far and wide. Unfortunately, the repercussions for some businesses have been incredibly detrimental, and many are grappling with a suddenly uncertain future. Now that the pandemic’s upheaval has stabilized, one would think these businesses should see a financial turnaround, and yet they continue to struggle. If it’s not the global pandemic, then […]
Continue readingWhy Use Analytics to Manage Your Sales Process?
Ask John Boyd. It was the early 50s, in the midst of the Korean War, John “40 second Boyd” arrived on the scene as an F-86 pilot. John Boyd was given this nickname because he was able to defeat any opposing pilot in an aerial dogfight in less than 40 seconds. At face value, one would attribute his success to excellent piloting skills. However, his favorite fighter jet was the F-16. In layman’s terms, the F-16 is a modest machine compared to other fighter jets such as the F-15. Specifically comparing it to the F-15, the F-16 lagged. You would think that John Boyd would be more successful utilizing a giant, faster fighter jet. This was not the case. The F-16 had a few intangibles […]
Continue readingThe Opaqueness of Corporate Culture
Hat tip to The Economist‘s Bartleby column (and its unnamed author, Philip Coggan) for continuing to shine the light on possibly the most powerful business force on the planet — “corporate culture.” In my earliest career, “corporate culture” both built, and then savagely destroyed, the two then-world-leading enterprise application software companies, McCormack & Dodge and MSA: In 1983, Dun & Bradstreet Corporation bought McCormack & Dodge for what The Wall Street Journal suggested was around $50 million bucks In 1990, the inelegantly renamed “Dun & Bradstreet Software” bought its biggest competitor, MSA, for around $330 million bucks In 1996, the whole sorry mess of incompatible corporate culture was cleaned up and taken off D&B’s red-ink-bleeding books by GEAC for a fire sale valuation of around […]
Continue readingTreat Others the Way You Want to be Treated… No, Thank You!
Treat others the way you want to be treated—the Golden Rule. Sounds good, wholesome, and righteous; yet I have concluded that this is not the best advice. That’s right, I said it. Look, I’m not trying to be contrarian or provocative here. I have spent years trying to understand how to build better relationships. This is key to having a better, more fulfilling life at home and work. I even went down the authenticity route. I was learning how to be authentic and speak my mind, “being real,” as the kids might say. Nope, that will not help you as it did not help me. Authenticity in building relationships is, shall I say, not very useful. Where did I land? For starters and brevity, I […]
Continue readingDriving B2B Sales Revenue Guest Podcast: Sales Enablement Like You’ve Never Known It (But Should)
About the Episode: There are not enough really smart, bold, experienced, and downright radical people in sales enablement. Luckily, there is one who made a guest appearance on this very podcast, this very episode. Dr. Tom Tonkin PhD isn’t a sales enablement practitioner like you’ve ever known. Razor sharp, a mind built for critical thinking, and the presumption that salespeople need to experience things in their inner world to be able to internalize any kind of meaningful learnings as a result of sales training. As for his methods – sorry kids, you’ll have to check out the episode to get a taste of that, but I assure you – you’ll be glad you did. So brace yourself for sales enablement like you’ve never known it […]
Continue readingMaking the Most of Your Corporate Events in 2022
‘Tis the season for new year’s resolutions. We’re all thinking about how we can do better in 2022, and if you’re a vendor planning to host events in the coming year, 3Sixty Insights has some advice to share. We’ve seen many vendors going all-in on events in the COVID era. Some have been great; others, not so much. Below are our takeaways from the past few years. First, let’s agree that event hosts should always offer virtual options. Even as we prepare for more in-person events, we must continue to provide virtual accessibility. If COVID has proven one thing, it’s that we are all living with uncertainty: about the future, about the right decisions, and about our own and others’ comfort levels. At this point, […]
Continue readingCase Study: isolved Re-Brand Transforms Culture and Enables Company to Weather the Pandemic Successfully
Many organizations struggle with internal strife due to siloed teams or positions. Marketing and sales are frequent combatants, a situation that is particularly unfortunate as sales enablement works best when it’s the responsibility and purview of both teams. Although sales enablement is often perceived as marketing-led, the fact is that while the sales team needs the resources marketing provides, the marketing team also needs feedback and context from sales in order to source the most effective and useful leads. The two roles certainly do depend on one another, but if the communication is lacking, this interdependence can breed frustration for both divisions. Without proper synergy, the sales team will be uninformed about the company’s marketing campaigns, and the marketing team won’t know what actually helps […]
Continue readingFintech, meet Foodtech
Markets are easily distracted by Fintech news. Just the other day, I found myself meandering around the internet researching a series of Fintech acquisitions that amounted to fewer than $8M in 2021 sales to a single-billion-dollar shrinking dinosaur. I woke up mid-webpage with a major déjà vu headache wondering how many times we were going to read that very same story before we learned to save ourselves the time and the trouble. (The Highlander already knows the way these things ultimately work). Okay, to be fair, and as Yum Brands knows, like their progenitor PepsiCo who spun them off, there’s usually at least two–right, Coca Cola? But there’s never 100, let alone 1000, let alone 10,000 in a market, like there are estimated Fintech startups […]
Continue readingResearch Note: Exploring the Necessity of Modern Customer Success in the Cloud
When did customer success become a department, a division, a role, at vendors of business software for the enterprise? It was when their leaders first feared that customers’ dissatisfaction with, or ambivalence over, the product would begin to affect the bottom line in uncomfortable ways. When and where was this? According to The Customer Success Association, it was in 1996 at Vantive, a company that produced software for customer relationship management. This surprised me. My guess was a cloud company as the first. But the rationale at that CRM company, Vantive, was similar. And, once it becomes relatively easy for customers to discard with one vendor’s product in favor of another product to address the same need, vendors are more apt to sense the urgency […]
Continue readingSalesforce Further Infiltrates HCM with Acquisition of Slack
Enter a highly infectious virus. To slow its spread, institute widespread lock-down orders. In tandem, order office employees to work from home and staff usually in the field to embrace unfamiliar, hybrid onsite-offsite schedules. Mix in a healthy dose of confusion to accompany this massive disruption to the heretofore expected way of doing things. Before 2020, collaboration tech was already the functionality all the cool companies had. It has suddenly become the must-have for just about any company as we approach 2021. Most nooks and crannies of the business could use effective applications for collaboration right now. Employees, customers, partners, prospects and other stakeholders need efficient, effective means, stat, to communicate, cooperate and coordinate. But end-to-end systems for the entire enterprise or silos of it […]
Continue readingHow to Develop an Account Planning Strategy – Infographic
It can be difficult to figure out a routine that helps to streamline account strategy. How do you manage contacts and leads and follow-ups and use your resources in the most efficient manner possible? It can be overwhelming and lead to a lot of inefficiencies. And there’s the notion of trying to figure out how to personalize that account strategy, too. Luckily there are ways that you can use accepted account planning strategies to do just that. Of course, you can start by figuring out what type of account you have – number of employees, industry, etc. But to really personalize things, you need to layer in the individual needs of the owners, employees, and customers in order to get a better understanding of how […]
Continue readingThe Importance of Technology in Your Small Business
A common theme within the writings and consultation that 3Sixty Insights takes on, is the pure and simple fact that businesses that remain stagnant can and will eventually fail… To avoid becoming stagnant, it is important for a business to constantly look into the mirror of self-reflection in order to find ways to continuously improve their business. One enabler within small businesses that we find commonly overlooked, is the area of technology… Technology costs money, and in the eyes of most small businesses, anything that costs money and doesn’t have a direct financial ROI, is taking money directly out of profits. However, technology is the unsung enabler within a small business that directly impacts how people perceive a business and its ability to efficiently communicate […]
Continue readingHow to Properly Prepare and Host a Virtual Meeting
Before mandated separation was in place, we all spent an incredible amount of time in virtual meetings. It was an essential part of how we all worked, but now that we are all stuck working from home, virtual meetings are a way of life. As a result, people have somewhat forgotten some of the essential rules for hosting and taking part of conference calls and online meetings. The purpose of this article is to share some quick tips to ensure you hold better and more efficient virtual meetings. Start with the invite itself – Remember, everyone’s calendar is stuffed with various agenda items. With people jumping from call to call, it is easy for your meeting to get lost in the mix of all the […]
Continue reading11 Tips to Realign Your Small Business for Success Today
We are in some difficult times. With essentially the entire world on lockdown, business has been tough. We are seeing businesses freezing budget, pulling back on expenses and laying off employees in record numbers, just to keep their heads above water. All is not lost, business around the world is being conducted and people are winning new deals. It has just become more difficult. In times like these, we continuously need to remind our teams that the slowdown is not a result of their actions and that their hard work can and will eventually pay off. Our rule of thumb is you have to work two or three times as hard in order to close the same (if not less) business… No level of complaining […]
Continue readingThe Importance of the Ding Email
As leaders, one of the toughest jobs we have is keeping a team motivated… When you break it down, we all spend on average 7.9 hours at work, and it is difficult for anyone to stay motivated 100% of that time. We are all human after all, and it’s natural to have cycles of intensity on the job. As leaders, we all have our tactics and secrets to team motivation… One that I wanted to share with you today is the concept of the “Ding Email”, which is something that not only can help motivate a team, but something that can help a team perform more efficiently as well. So, what is a Ding Email? Well, a common practice within many sales cultures is to […]
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