Gazing Performance - People

Gazing UK Team
Martin Fairn
Bede Brosnahan
Nicky Simonds-Gooding
Emma Trinder
Emmanuelle Dehon
Angela Bairstow
Sarah Ward

Gazing UK Associates
Ian Cochrane
David Jones
Richard Williams
Emma Vyvyan
Paul Vyvyan
Phil Robins

Education

Education - Develop the teaching skills that aren't taught in college

Budgets. Bad behaviour. Bureaucracy. Need we go on? Everyone in education knows the pressures that stress-out teachers. And, like school discipline, the pressures are getting worse.

This pressure can cause carefully prepared lesson plans to fall apart. Techniques and plans put together in college can all too easily disintegrate when exposed to real pressure in the real world. As the pressure mounts, morale declines. Many schools and LEAs are reporting recruitment and retention problems.

Unfortunately, while colleges teach people to become teachers, they often don't teach them how to handle the pressures of being a teacher.

Fortunately, we do.

Read More.......

Articles

Gazing selected by London Irish RFU to work with the coaching squad and players to help develop the mental skills of the team. Bede Brosnahan, Director of Operations says "We are delighted to be working with Brian Smith and his team and look forward to supporting them throughout this season."

Articles
Performing Under Pressure - Gazing work with England Rugby's Junior National Academy
RFU adds Mental Skills to List of Skills Needed to Develop World Class Rugby Players
Teaching Under Pressure
Winning in Business
The Fifth Element
Heads You Win - The development of Mental Skills Coaching in the World of Sport

Abbey Navigates

Abbey Navigates Around the Jargon Thanks to Gazing

Most business observers would smile at the thought of banks being considered ‘victims of their own success’, but the ease with which UK banks persuaded their customers to embrace the internet as a primary communication tool has created its own customer service headache, namely how to rebuild a closer personal relationship with their customers, many of whom may now feel disinclined to ‘re-engage’ with their banks.

For Abbey, the biggest UK bank focusing exclusively on personal financial services, and which adopted as part of its 2003 relaunch, a determination to ‘turn banking on its head’, this problem became of crucial concern, as it went to the heart of what they wanted to achieve, namely, to offer the highest level of customer service and advice to UK customers.

It was an easy task, therefore, for the bank to decide last year to build and staff its own dedicated 100-seat call centre in Belfast. It was a less easy task, however, to give the call centre staff the requisite skills that would allow them to deal efficiently and confidently with the more complex telephone conversations that now form part of the new heightened relationship between the bank and its 18 million customers.

Abbey therefore turned to specialist sales training company Gazing Performance Ltd to help them develop these skills and the results speak for themselves: uplift in sales conversion ratios; a reduced staff churn and a more confident workforce.

For Carol York, Abbey’s Head of Customer Outreach and the manager tasked with ensuring that the Belfast call centre facility helped the company to deliver on its promise to ‘get rid of financial jargon’, the main issue she faced was centred around getting the structure of the call right.

As she says, “During a call, customers want us to get to the crux of their issue quickly and with the minimum of fuss and pain. They want us to talk to them in plain English, ie, no financial gobbledegook. And yet the level of complexity involved in selling personal financial products is now very high. This presented us with a problem. How do we reconcile the two? We felt that we needed to focus on what we called the ‘call framework’ itself”.

Carol and her team felt that they didn’t have the skills needed in-house to provide this level of specialist training to their staff and so called in a number of candidate suppliers to pitch for their business. Carol’s decision to award the training contract to Gazing was based on two factors: the more formulaic approach offered by most of Gazing’s competitors and the opportunity that Gazing’s approach offered to be used as a coaching tool, rather than a sales tool.

She said, “most of the sales training available to us was very linear, which, if implemented, would have made the call sound very scripted. Given our determination to demonstrate to our customers that a ‘radical shift’ had taken place in our approach to customer service, this was not acceptable.

Gazing’s ‘Selling Under Pressure’ approach, however, offered a better insight into the mindset of the customer and would help equip the operator with a set of tools that would help them ‘navigate’ their way around the call. Of no less importance, was the fact that only Gazing could substantiate what they claimed!”.

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Management Team

Teligent Management Team Use Gazing To Help Develop UK Business

It is a truism of modern management thinking, that if a company’s management is to deliver a business plan capable of meeting the company’s objectives then they must first understand what those objectives are, and secondly, to believe in them. If either of these ‘conditions’ are not met, then the business plan will fail. One company that was able to meet both conditions is Teligent, whose UK Managing Director brought in Gazing Performance Ltd to help his management team ‘take ownership’ of their plan and deliver it with impressive results.

What makes Teligent’s achievements doubly impressive is that they operate within the UK telecommunications industry, an industry sector that has seen unprecedented turbulence and volatility in recent times, which makes achieving any kind of business plan all the more remarkable.

Listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, Teligent offers telecommunications carriers and service providers advanced, comprehensive and flexible solutions in order to increase network usage and revenue streams. Since its formation in 1990 the company has become a pioneer in both the development of service platforms and the implementation of a wide and growing range of service applications. Its self-imposed mission is to ‘add value to network service providers by providing application based solutions on a service development platform’.
The company set up its UK office in 1994 to serve the many British and global players based in the UK. Mark Pilgrim, its UK MD joined the company some years later with a brief to help the company negotiate its way through what had become an increasingly precarious and volatile market. The way Mark saw it, for the company to operate successfully in such market conditions, it had to develop a business plan that the management team could believe in and saw themselves capable of delivering.

He said, “I knew that for any kind of plan to work, the existing team had to believe it was their idea so they could articulate the vision to the rest of the workforce and provide the necessary direction. The telecommunications industry is characterized by big companies attempting to execute global business plans, but these alienate the people that are expected to deliver them. I knew for Teligent to succeed, the management must feel emotionally attached to the Plan”.

Because of this ‘human’ dimension, calling in management consultants to help them formulate the plan was not an option and Mark turned instead to Gazing Performance Ltd. Mark had worked with trainers from Gazing in the past, and knew that their service would be appropriate for Teligent. Talking about his decision to employ them, Mark says simply, “I trusted them and knew that they would deliver something for the company and the individual. I knew that their training would help the management team to better understand themselves and out of that improved understanding, a workable plan would emerge”.

Gazing recommended that Teligent use its ‘Human Performance Model’ to help the company define its UK strategy. This particular training course is the cornerstone of the company’s training portfolio and the one that has achieved a considerable following amongst the many delegates who have been on the course. It is based on clearly addressing the ‘human’ factors that can undermine a person – or team’s – performance; in particular, it focuses on the mental processes that underpin a superior performance or an ‘under-performance’.

Management Team

Teligent Management Team Use Gazing To Help Develop UK Business

It is a truism of modern management thinking, that if a company’s management is to deliver a business plan capable of meeting the company’s objectives then they must first understand what those objectives are, and secondly, to believe in them. If either of these ‘conditions’ are not met, then the business plan will fail. One company that was able to meet both conditions is Teligent, whose UK Managing Director brought in Gazing Performance Ltd to help his management team ‘take ownership’ of their plan and deliver it with impressive results.

What makes Teligent’s achievements doubly impressive is that they operate within the UK telecommunications industry, an industry sector that has seen unprecedented turbulence and volatility in recent times, which makes achieving any kind of business plan all the more remarkable.

Listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, Teligent offers telecommunications carriers and service providers advanced, comprehensive and flexible solutions in order to increase network usage and revenue streams. Since its formation in 1990 the company has become a pioneer in both the development of service platforms and the implementation of a wide and growing range of service applications. Its self-imposed mission is to ‘add value to network service providers by providing application based solutions on a service development platform’.
The company set up its UK office in 1994 to serve the many British and global players based in the UK. Mark Pilgrim, its UK MD joined the company some years later with a brief to help the company negotiate its way through what had become an increasingly precarious and volatile market. The way Mark saw it, for the company to operate successfully in such market conditions, it had to develop a business plan that the management team could believe in and saw themselves capable of delivering.

He said, “I knew that for any kind of plan to work, the existing team had to believe it was their idea so they could articulate the vision to the rest of the workforce and provide the necessary direction. The telecommunications industry is characterized by big companies attempting to execute global business plans, but these alienate the people that are expected to deliver them. I knew for Teligent to succeed, the management must feel emotionally attached to the Plan”.

Because of this ‘human’ dimension, calling in management consultants to help them formulate the plan was not an option and Mark turned instead to Gazing Performance Ltd. Mark had worked with trainers from Gazing in the past, and knew that their service would be appropriate for Teligent. Talking about his decision to employ them, Mark says simply, “I trusted them and knew that they would deliver something for the company and the individual. I knew that their training would help the management team to better understand themselves and out of that improved understanding, a workable plan would emerge”.

Gazing recommended that Teligent use its ‘Human Performance Model’ to help the company define its UK strategy. This particular training course is the cornerstone of the company’s training portfolio and the one that has achieved a considerable following amongst the many delegates who have been on the course. It is based on clearly addressing the ‘human’ factors that can undermine a person – or team’s – performance; in particular, it focuses on the mental processes that underpin a superior performance or an ‘under-performance’.

Avis

Avis - Avis tries harder with help from Gazing Performance, and succeeds!

A fifty per cent increase in sales has been achieved by Avis as a result of adopting the skills learnt from a highly innovative sales training course supplied by training company Gazing Performance Ltd.

The course, Telesales Under Pressure ©, has been devised by Gazing specifically for the call centre industry. It is based on giving the course delegates a clear understanding of the different thought processes that a customer moves through when a successful 'telephone interaction' takes place, and how to influence that process.

And importantly for Ian Roberts, who heads up the Avis Sales Direct team, it works! He believes that the course has contributed to a 50 per cent improvement in sales.

He said: "The techniques that we learnt from Gazing form the backbone to our department. The team believe in it and use it everyday. It has had a significant impact on the performance of the team, not only in terms of sales, where the numbers have gone up, but the team feels less stressed too".

Ian's team, which is based in Hayes, Middlesex, is tasked with selling Avis Advance, a car rental programme aimed at small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and Avis MaxiRent, which offers customers a flexible alternative to leasing. As both products are predominantly sold over the telephone, the wide range of benefits included in the packages, meant that the sales call could be quite lengthy, which in turn can increase the risk of losing the sale as the call progresses. One of Ian's key management tasks, therefore, when taking up his post in April earlier this year, was to move the department's perception of itself from a telesales department to a sales department.

He said: "I needed a sales training course that the team would really buy into. I obviously wanted to see an increase in sales, but didn't want to impose a brand new 'regime' that had to be learnt. Many sales training courses impose a fairly rigid structure that you have to follow. This wouldn't be applicable in our business where the sales team talk to a very diverse customer base. The Gazing training course offered us something that was highly flexible and crucially gave the team the confidence to reach higher levels of performance".

The course is also unusual in its use of 'maps' that provide a clear pathway to be followed during a call, and thus provide the telesales team with the mental tools required to cope with the most challenging or resistant of potential customers.

By having access to a map whilst on a call, the sales team are able to stay focused on their objective and yet not appear to be following a script; important when dealing with SMEs who pride themselves on their independence and non-conformist approach to life!

QAS uses Gazing to speak the Language of Success

QAS uses Gazing to speak the Language of Success

There are probably more stereotypes surrounding the sales team than any other department within a company. Members of sales teams are, by general consensus, believed to be unbelievably pushy, always refuse to take no for an answer and are, to a person, job-hopping mavericks who won’t toe the corporate line and whose primary concern in life is the size of their bonus!

For one British company, QAS, the reality is very different. Its sales team can point to lengthy careers within the company and a consistently successful performance based on close teamwork that has cemented the company into a market leader position, despite intense pressure from the competition.

And some of its recent success can be attributed to its partnership with Gazing Performance, who has provided QAS with a sales framework that is standing the test of time, in the most rigorous of conditions.

QAS first set up in 1990, has experienced extraordinary growth to become the UK’s market leader in address management and data accuracy solutions. Today, the company employs more than 400 people across the UK, USA, Europe and Asia and handles more than 9,400 customers including market leaders, blue chips and public sector departments.

Despite backing from its parent Experian (itself part of the GUS group) and an impressive year on year revenue growth, the company knows that it can’t afford to rest on its laurels as the marketspace that it occupies – helping organisations to manage the integrity of their data – comes under increasing pressure in the form of legislation, constant threats to computer security and changing consumer attitudes towards data privacy. Selecting and retaining a new sales training provider, then, formed an important part of the sales management’s strategy to keep things fresh. Crucially, for them, the new training supplier had to be able to handle a sizeable sales operation and could offer a training framework that provided a consistent approach; in addition coaching could play an important role.

According to John Sharman and Stuart Johnston, the QAS sales managers that originally headed up the selection process, this narrowed the field of likely contenders considerably. John said, “We had a clear set of decision criteria in terms of what we were looking for, but the most important was that the supplier had to offer an approach that could be equally applicable to a graduate working in our telesales operation, to an experienced sales person with ten to twelve years’ experience of working at the sharp end of selling. We also wanted to work with someone who had an equally pragmatic attitude and so wouldn’t burden us with theory”.
Unusually for an industry more closely associated with high staff turnover, QAS has a policy of ‘growing its own’ and both John and Stuart were clear that to help their staff continuously develop and grow into new jobs, there had to be a uniform approach to sales so that, as today’s graduate trainee could be tomorrow’s sales manager, they could use the same set of tools and the same language.

Stuart said, “New starters can often feel left out as they don’t understand the language used in the company. Similarly when someone gets promoted or changes jobs, we could not afford for them to have to learn a new terminology. Flexibility is important to us and we needed to make sure that the incoming sales trainers could match that”.

Gazing Helps Xerox

Gazing Helps Xerox to ‘Get on the same page

Making sure that the entire sales function is performing to its maximum potential represents one of the biggest challenges facing large corporations today. For that to happen, all elements of the sales process, including channel support, training and management attention must be fully ‘synchronised’. And this aim gets more difficult to achieve for larger corporations with numerous product lines, operating across wide geographical areas and selling through multiple sales channels.

The Xerox Corporation, a global brand leader employing 67,000 people worldwide, faced just this challenge and, perhaps surprisingly, turned to a twelve-man training company in Richmond, Surrey to help them resolve it. The result has been a truly astonishing feat that has not only reduced costs and increased sales, but also effected a change in internal culture and restrengthened relationships with a $1billion distribution channel.

The company in question, Gazing Performance Ltd, has worked with the Xerox European sales management team since 1998 and has helped them achieve the ‘holy grail’ that has eluded so many large corporates, how to create a sales training programme that can embrace every individual involved in the sales process, from the new starter to the distributors’ management team; how to ‘educate’ the company’s senior management so they better support the sales process and how to ensure that the focus of everyone’s attention remains resolutely on the customer.

Gazing’s ‘scalability’ has been truly impressive too. Since the original pilot project – training over 1000 new starters – the company has trained over 20,000 staff from both Xerox and its channel partners.

According to John Esposito, the Gazing director responsible for winning the original project, one of the biggest challenges faced was persuading Xerox that the Gazing team could add value to an organisation that already had a global reputation for the quality and standard of its training programmes!

He said, “We were aware that the delegates who attended Xerox’s existing training courses regularly awarded the company satisfaction ratings of over 90%. The question then was “how can you beat that?” To us, the answer was not to ‘beat’ the existing scores, but to create a more ‘joined up’ approach to something that had become incredibly disjointed and un-focused”.

Steve Hill, the European Training Manager for Xerox Europe takes up the story. He said: “We were aware
that we no longer had a ‘line of sight’ from the training to the business. It’s easy to fall into a ‘tick box’ mentality regarding training. We needed to rediscover where each person was in terms of development and skills acquisition and then get them all connected.

We were lacking a ‘tag element’ that would re-create those connections”.

This disjointed approach to sales training is not unique to Xerox but is one of the by-products of multinational organisational structures that acquire companies (in Xerox’s case, the Tektronix Inc.’s Colour Printing and Imaging Division), move into new geographic territories and develop multiple channels to market.

Human Performance

Human Performance Center is a 1,200-seat multi-purpose arena in New Orleans, Louisiana. The venue, known to fans as the "Chamber of Horrors," has been since the 2005-06 season the temporary home to the University of New Orleans Privateers basketball teams while Lakefront Arena is being repaired following Hurricane Katrina. UNO basketball teams previously played at this venue from the 1969-70 inception of the UNO men's program through the opening of Lakefront Arena in 1983. During that period, the venue was officially known as the Health & Physicial Education Center.

Performance

A performance, in performing arts, generally comprises an event in which one group of people (the performer or performers) behave in a particular way for another group of people (the audience). Sometimes the dividing line between performer and the audience may become blurred, as in the example of "participatory theatre" where audience members might get involved in the production. Performances, for example in theatre, can take place daily, or at some other regular interval.