Blogs & Articles

There was something I witnessed recently that is worth recounting because it was an answer to a question that came from the voice of innocence, as it were. By that I mean, I was with a client in one of their management meetings recently, when the issue of what that company was going to do with their strategy going forward was raised. A junior manager then asked, “what’s the plan then?”. An honest enough question you might say, but then the young manager followed this up with “We don’t need a plan anyway as we’ll just fumble our way through it like we normally do”. Maybe it was an attempt at humour but his comments elicited a response from a a senior manager that I will try and recall as best I can, in essence at least.

We are very fortunate at Maguire Training to have an outstanding team whose main objective is to provide the highest level of service we can muster for our clients. As a consequence of that we are proud to say that we rarely receive complaints about our service, which means (happily) that we have no need for a ‘customer complaint line’ as such. That is not to say that things don’t occasionally go wrong, because they do of course, however, if a mishap occurs then we try to view this as an opportunity to delight our client rather than it be a challenge.

In your sales career, there are going to be times when you have to pitch or present to more than one person. This can either be a fully planned and totally expected scenario or it could be that you arrive at your client’s offices and are caught by surprise.

Everyone leads differently, depending on their industry, team and individual styles. However, there are certain qualities that a successful leader should show towards their team, that will get them on your side almost every time. There is no right or wrong way to lead as long as your method works for you and your team.

How often have you seen someone promoted to sales manager just because they were the best salesperson? It’s more common than you think and the best salespeople don’t always make the best sales managers. The result is that they end up failing, leaving, or both. This means the company loses two employees, needing to replace the great salesperson and find a new sales manager. Heres how to make sure that you don't fall into this catagory.

The majority of us will work for around 40 years, meaning being happy with our jobs and workplace is essential for confidence, positive mindsets and high levels of productivity. It will become very tiring doing something you don't enjoy day in and day out for all that time.

Anyone who has ever delivered training and said to a group of delegates, “ok, we’ll now do some role-play scenarios”, will undoubtedly be familiar with the look of shock and horror coming back from at least some of the faces in the room at the very suggestion of such a thing.

Although the concept of communicating is easy, communicating well and in different forms takes skill and practice to master, and even then, there is always room for improvement. Different members of your team will need and prefer different kinds of communication depending on what works for them, the same goes for you so you must be adaptable when it comes to communication.

This is making huge waves at all levels of learning and development, and companies are also realising that what is really important is not that employees sit through training, but that they can do something useful at the end of it.

Recently in one or our commercial meetings, I was asked by a new starter in our business what the difference was between ‘selling’ and ‘consultative selling’. As I began to explain I could hear myself starting to make this sound all very windswept and interesting but ultimately I realised it was actually getting to be a little confusing for the inductee as I found myself talking about it being a much more deeper and complicated process than merely selling something to someone.

For many years the HR Community have religiously collated learning and development requirements via the organisations Performance Appraisal process. From this data a schedule of interventions are normally put in place to satisfy employee needs.

Having just had a winter crisis in the NHS and with budget cuts affecting the NHS left, right and centre. Saving time, money and resources are crucial for the stability and ongoing day-to-day running of the NHS. In addition to attending courses, e-learning offers an interactive, engaging and cost-effective way of broadening your skills. Here are 3 reasons why an online e-learning platform could be beneficial to improving productivity in the NHS.