Recently, I met with one of our clients in the San Francisco bay area during their weekly sales meeting to help them understand some of the new features of Readers and Insight.
I have always enjoyed helping people learn something new, and this day was no exception.
We talked about several features that would help them find more groups likely too book events at their hotel, including comp set alerts, how to view past events for a particular group, how to find a list of the 50 most active groups in their market, and then I showed them how to run a search of every group that had an event in their market during the month of December over the past 3 years.
WOW! That was a lot to absorb in the short 45 minutes we had together. In fact, one of the sales managers said just that, “Whew….I’m in information overload.” And this is the challenge faced by anyone who is learning something new. There is only so much a person can learn at one time before overload takes over.
The most effective way to overcome this challenge is to apply what we learn as soon as possible. I told the team that if they want this stuff to stick, they need to go back to their desk right now and put it into practice. They were gracious. I gave them my card and reminded them to start right away.
The next day, one of the sales managers called me to ask a few questions about how to do one of the tasks we talked about. She was 80% there, and all I had to do was nudge her a little. She got it.
Whether my meeting was effective remains to be seen, but I know one thing; this sales manager paid attention, listened, and went back to her desk and applied what she learned right away. When she called, she did not ask me to spoon feed her. She had specific questions about a specific task, and just needed a little push. When I nudged her, the light bulb went on. “I got it!” she exclaimed. “Thanks, Bill.”
