Over the years, Linda has spoken on many topics, before many groups in large auditoriums and intimate office settings. Working with her is like buying Legos. If you are a parent, grandparent, aunt, or uncle, you understand this concept. You can buy a basic set of Lego building bricks for $10 or $20. Depending on how old your kids are, what they like to do, how much room you have, and what your tolerance is for stepping on small plastic parts at 3 am, you can stick with the basics or buy a 4,300-piece Tower Bridge or a $400 Super Star Destroyer.
When you need outside insights, you may want them delivered in Carnegie Hall or in small group breakout sessions, workshops, seminars, webinars, dinner speeches, audios or CDs to use anywhere, or somewhere in between. As with Legos, you may just want the starter kit with 100 pieces or be ready for the advanced one with thousands of pieces, and connectors. Any of the Incedo Group topics can be presented in a 30-60 minute-long session or a year-long program – or anywhere in between. Again, as with Legos, where you won’t be able to build the Tower Bridge with a 100 piece set, you won’t get our in-depth presentation in 30 minutes, but you will have an interesting, useful, and probably entertaining experience that will make you ready for more.
As you browse our topics and popular presentation formats, keep in mind that Incedo Group customizes every live presentation for the audience at hand. If you want a different take on what you see, please let us know. Please click on the general topics below to see the Incedo Group’s view on these import business topics.
Innovation
Your company may seem to be doing fine by all measures: you’re profitable, your workforce and customers are happy, and you are respected in the industry. Then, zap, the economy tanks, and it’s as if all the energy is drained from the place. You lose business, and have to reduce your budget to make up for the loss in revenue. Some staff leaves and you consider letting others go, as morale plunges and stress skyrockets. As you recharge you company, you are at an ideal place to ask some tough questions about how your company functions and what could make it better. Regardless of what is happening in the business world, you can harness your internal resources to generate the power once more! Have you created an environment that promotes top performance? Do you have the right people in the right jobs? Have you probed key people for their ideas – and listened to their answers? Are there communication barriers in your organization that you have been ignoring? Can status quo sustain you or do you need to make changes, perhaps even radical changes? What You Will Learn: When hard times hit your company like a power outage, you can reevaluate you systems, leadership, communication techniques, and customer focus and more, and come back stronger than before.
You’ve likely heard that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but leadership is often fearful of making mistakes. A lot can ride on a business decision, but fear can immobilize you, stifle innovation, and inhibit the potential that we bring to the table. When we, are afraid to show leadership for fear of failing, we lose sight of the benefits and long-term value mistakes bring to the business landscape. Risk-taking leads to business success. Businesses succeed by seeking knowledge, learning from mistakes and having the confidence to act on that growing base of information and experience in their relationships with clients, employees and vendors. How can mistakes energize your business? How does fear impede progress when you fear making a mistake? How will clients, staff, vendors, and colleagues react when you take risks – and what often happens? How do you repair the damage when decisions misfire? How teaching your people how to make decisions can increase creativity? What You Will Learn: When you overcome the fear of making mistakes, you help your business soar. This topic helps you take flight and soar toward your full potential.
Leadership
Change is often a bittersweet fact of leadership. The often frantic pace of today’s business world can be overwhelming and even anxiety-producing, yet some of our most creative ideas and innovative business solutions are born in the midst of and in response to change and transformation. Whether change comes from within, from the need to be more competitive, or as a result of a fractured economy, the role of leadership must be clear. How do leaders keep up with change and learn to drive it? What does significant change mean to key decision-makers within an organization? How do you establish trust and produce effective leadership within your organization while the foundation of your business is shifting beneath you? How do leaders connect with shareholders, the senior leadership, and with the workforce when changes are affecting business-as-usual? What You Will Learn: These questions are particularly important today when more than ever, leadership must drive the change from mediocrity to excellence, from competence to cutting-edge, from unproductive to profitable. Leadership must step up; but how do you help leaders realize their expanding role? This topic lays out the role of leadership in times of change and helps them realize their potential.
Leadership is not just a title or a line item on the organizational chart, but implies the ability to guide a group of people through relatively calm as well as turbulent times. Titles like “supervisor,” “department head,” “manager,” or even “president” do not guarantee cooperation, much less respect. Weak leaders can have a hard time setting or enforcing policies, much less inspiring the troops or leading them to greatness. Though some in leadership roles are in way over their heads and may not have the aptitude for it, leadership training will benefit those who have the “right stuff.” Can your company be successful without great leadership? How do you develop leadership potential in yourself or in others? How do you recognize leadership potential in your company How can you turn managers into leaders? How do you seek out those who have the “right stuff” to be leaders? What You Will Learn: For your company to progress, you must have leaders throughout the organization. If you can learn to develop the leadership potential you have on hand your company can become the forward-looking, profitable company you envision.
Communication
Are there elephant in your workplace? Those obvious things that everyone recognizes but no one acknowledges yet you have to walk around? When they take up residence in the workplace, elephants cause roadblocks to communication and productivity. The effect? People don’t hear your directions, don’t accept responsibility, and focus on petty issues. You expect them to be adults who do their jobs and, yet you spend your time explaining yourself or resolving conflict. When you chase those elephants away, you can get back to business and communicate clearly to a more receptive audience. How can you promote positive energy, free of office gossip and destructive backbiting in your department, team or company? How do you get communication to stop being a barrier and use it as a tool to move your company forward? How can you turn your staff from being clock watchers without initiative and ownership to happy, efficient, focused, energized, accountable, creative, and trusting individuals? How can you create a culture of commitment and accountability within your organization? What You Will Learn: When clear, unambiguous communication is the norm in your company, you will see productivity rise and frustration fall on all levels. You can transform your workplace by chasing the elephants away
At its most basic level, communication is a mere exchange of information. That works when you buy a gallon of milk. You say “How much is this? The clerk replies “$2.98.” You say, “Great, thanks, here you go” as you pay and leave the store. In most situations, when you communicate, you want more. You need to get a better sense of a candidate you interview. You desire to understand your customer’s wants, needs, and values when you sell them your product or service face-to-face or set up a marketing plan to promote it. You want to be honest yet compassionate when working through problems with your staff. Just exchanging words won’t do the trick. You need to communicate in a way that makes your listener willing to feel comfortable enough to open up, or as they say in Japan, “open their kimonos” to allow you get beneath the surface. How can you move beyond superficial communication in your business and personal relationships? How can you get your body language in sync with your words and be more attuned to that of others? How can you deliver bad news or criticism without making your listener “close their kimono” and shut down communication? How can you encourage others to share useful information that you need to know to make good decisions? What You Will Learn: Good communication leads to lasting relationships. When you learn to develop trust through proper communication, you will more often get the outcome you want.
Sales
More than any other hire you make, you want your sales people to meet and beat your expectations. Sales people can become rock stars who positively affect your company’s bottom line. Some come to the job with a natural gift of gab and good persuasion skills, but good training can turn even a competent sale person into an outstanding spokesperson for your brand. This means more than familiarizing them with your product line; it’s about helping them develop enhanced communication skills that will enable them to assess and be responsive to the needs of customers, coworkers, and management. Thus they can develop the type of lasting relationships that lead to higher order totals now, and repeat sales in the future. How can planning make a good sales person ever better? How do advanced communication skills help a good sales person pick up the nuances of a sales situation, especially when handling objections? How can getting little closes along the way get the prospect to “yes”? What will make a potential customer stop and listen to you? What will make them take the next step of buying? Do you fear losing sales because of not knowing how to handle an objection, how to uncover a prospect’s needs, or how to make effective calls to prospects? What You Will Learn: Modern salesmanship is all about stopping, thinking, and preparing the best plan to approach a prospective client. A salesperson who can probe their customer’s needs and really listen to responses will become increasingly better at in determining whether their client’s words and body language are saying “yes,” “no,” or “maybe.” The basic stages of selling – from prospecting though delivering the final product – require a thoughtful approach to communicating with your customer
You’ve heard the expression about how if you give a man a fish, he’ll have lunch. If you teach him how to fish, he will have the ability to avoid hunger for a lifetime. The sales manager’s version of this is if you tell your sales force the basics of selling, they may make this month’s quota, but to excel, you need to teach them to ask for up sells and referrals and more. These add-ons to current sales and sources for future sales make every sales transaction worth more. This can happen if your sales people learn to identify when to probe, when to suggest, and when to ask for more. How can you help your sales force recognize these opportunities for more sales – and take advantage of them? How do you and your sales people identify these opportunities during the prospecting stage, the sales process, and or after the sale? Can you teach all sales folks to see the opportunities to maximize the sale or just a few elite? How can you see other sales opportunities when you are focusing on the customer? What You Will Learn: You and your sales people are leaving money on the table if you don’t get the most out of every sale. When you really communicate with the prospect, you may discover other needs that you can also meet. Satisfied clients give referrals!
