The (New) Skills You Need to Succeed in Sales

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by Lynette Ryals and Javier Marcos

The practice of business-to-business selling is in a curious state. On the one hand, commentators and academics are repeatedly telling us that transactional selling is outmoded and that relational selling is the ‘new normal.’ On the other hand, most businesses are operating with traditional models of salesperson recruitment and training. The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) estimates that in the U.S., $15 billion is spent per year on sales training. However, many salespeople find the training they receive either ineffective or less than useful. Given the importance of skills and capabilities to sales performance, businesses need to reconsider who they recruit into sales roles, and how they train them. Continue reading →

The Death of Outsourcing

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 Written by Cliff Justice, KPMG Partner, Shared Services and Outsourcing Advisory

There is a revolution taking shape in the business services industry, one that disregards the traditional shared services and outsourcing paradigms and centers the design of support services on the needs and priorities of the enterprise as a whole.

Since the information technology outsourcing mega-deals of the 1990’s and through the expansion of offshoring and business process outsourcing in the 2000’s, companies have consistently sought ways to use sourcing strategies to reduce the cost of back office services. Continue reading →

Women (and Men) Can Have It All

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written by by Tony Schwartz

Annie Marie Slaughter‘s article in the current Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” had a familiar ring — hauntingly so.

More than two decades ago, the Harvard Business Review published an article titled “Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” which made many of the same arguments that Slaughter does — most notably that the structure of organizational life makes it nearly impossible for a woman to have both a high-powered full-time career and to feel fully involved as a mother. Continue reading →

Dealing with a Bad Boss

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Written by John Beeson

It’s often said there’s nothing certain in life except death and taxes. The parallel in organizational life is that at some point in your career you’ll have a bad boss — or at least a boss who’s bad for you. Bad bosses come in all shapes and sizes: abrasive and insensitive, indecisive, inconsistent and unfair, the micromanager who stifles your ability to perform and grow, and “matador managers” adept at sidestepping every tough issue that comes their way. So, the question isn’t whether or not you’ll have a bad boss. Rather, it’s how you’ll respond when you do. Continue reading →