{"id":110922,"date":"2014-08-01T10:19:57","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T17:19:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/partnersinexcellenceblog.com\/?p=56267"},"modified":"2014-08-01T10:19:40","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T17:19:40","slug":"learning-to-teach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/learning-to-teach\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning To Teach"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days.\u00a0 To often, what I see of teaching is\u00a0a more advanced\u00a0form of a pitch.<\/p>\r\n

Rather than pitching our products, we are now pitching business issues the customer should be\u00a0concerned about.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps they are trends in the industry, opportunities they may be missing, opportunities for them to improve their operations.<\/p>\r\n

I suppose there is some merit to this,\u00a0at least we are talking about the customers’ issues and not about our products.\u00a0 But too often, they\u00a0don’t translate to collaborative discussions, shared learning, and taking action with the customer.<\/p>\r\n

It’s also curious, that we seem to be\u00a0inventing teaching–at least in the context of selling–ourselves, rather than learning from the best practices of people who teach for a profession.<\/p>\r\n

I was struck by a passage in Joe Nocera’s OpEd<\/strong> <\/em>piece in the New York Times<\/strong><\/em>, Teaching Teaching<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 He has the following quote about great teachers:<\/p>\r\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t need to be a genius,\u201d Green told me recently. \u201cYou have to know how to manage a discussion. You have to know which problems are the ones most likely to get the lessons across. You have to understand how students make mistakes \u2014 how they think \u2014 so you can respond to that.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n

It reveals so much of what we miss about teaching.\u00a0 Teaching is not about telling, teaching is not about the pitch, it’s managing a discussion–whether with a child, our customers, or within our own organizations.\u00a0 So the focus of teaching–and the focus of our skills development around teaching our customers has to be on how to manage the discussion.<\/p>\r\n

The second piece is not so subtle, but often missed when we try to teach our customers.\u00a0\u00a0 We have to know the problems that are likely to get the lessons across.\u00a0 Great teachers know how to manage the discussions, and the learning of the student to achieve\u00a0the desired outcome. Translated into “sales speak,”\u00a0 we have to know the problems we are the best in the world at solving, engage our customers in teaching discussions, managing the discussion to an outcome which gets the customer to take action.\u00a0 Every lesson plan has specific outcomes and objectives.\u00a0 (OK, I’m taking some liberties with my interpretation of that sentence, please grant me some literary license.)<\/p>\r\n

Finally, we have to understand our customers, how they think, how they make mistakes, and have the ability to manage the discussion in ways that achieve the desired outcomes.\u00a0 We have to be\u00a0able to put ourselves in the customer’s position, understanding what drives\/motivates them, what obstacles stand in the way of their ability to achieve\u00a0their goals, how they get things done.\u00a0 Without this, we can’t guide the discussion to achieve it’s objectives.<\/p>\r\n

So as we design our training programs, it seems we need to focus less on the teaching pitch, but more on managing the discussion.<\/p>\r\n

There are some that worry, can sales people actually learn to teach?\u00a0 Nocera leaves us with great optimism on that:<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Are these skills easier for some people than others? Of course they are. But they can be taught, even to people who don\u2019t instinctively know how to do these things.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been writing about “teaching our customers” these days.\u00a0 To often, what I see of teaching is\u00a0a more advanced\u00a0form of a pitch. Rather than pitching our products, we are now pitching business issues the customer should be\u00a0concerned about.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps they are trends in the industry, opportunities they may be missing, opportunities for them to improve their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6963,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[128,85],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110922"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6963"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/customerthink.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}