No matter what industry, product/service your company sells, your company stage and more, there are certain characteristics that are foundational to providing excellent customer success.
Empathy.
Care.
Positive Attitude.
Proactive.
Creative.
Open minded.
Organized.
Team work.
Flexible.
What more would you like to add?
Workshops that could provide tremendous value to current college students especially after they graduate are:
Financial Management
Priority Management
Skills Development
Health and Fitness
Leadership
Networking
Workshops are focused, interactive, and the results can be immediate.
With the current pace of technological advancements, workshops are more effective than year long programs to get faster and effective results.
The format of workshops enables participants to learn a new skill, become more knowledgeable about a topic/subject, interact with other team members etc. in a short time frame.
Online workshops can be as effective as in person workshops and can have participants from various parts of the world.
Which workshop(s) have you attended recently or planning to participate in?
Should you develop your product first or start marketing the idea first?
If the idea has some legs to become a business, building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) first could help. Once you’ve build an MVP, you can test it out with potential customers. Collect feedback from early users of your product/service and continue developing it to create the best value to your product/service users. Marketing the product/service once you’ve built a user base would be prudent.
Product development and marketing will go hand in hand overtime. In the initial stages, product development should be prioritized over marketing. An excellent product/service will always be easier to market!
A skilled professional should be respected, valued, and paid as much as someone that can be found in a particular region.
With remote work and freelancing work becoming more common than ever before, companies have a global talent pool to fill their vacancies. A skilled professional based in the US would generally get paid more than a skilled professional with similar qualifications in South Asia because the argument went that the cost of living in the US was higher so the professional needs to get paid more. Over the span of few decades, companies have been looking for talent in offshore regions for cost savings (primarily), time zones turnaround, work flexibility, proximity to customers etc.
The talent pool and the job/career marketplace is now global. Companies can have skilled professionals working on their products/services from anywhere in the world and the skilled professionals have a global job/career opportunity pool. Skilled professionals based in South Asia should get paid equally to a professional based in the US if the individual has similar qualifications, work ethic, quality of work produced and such. It’s a win-win for both companies and skilled professionals everywhere!
A company, WeAreGrowing Inc. decides to add several new team members to its company. They place ads, go through job sites, and recruiters to find and interview the best talent to join their growing company. Lots of time, human resources, and energy goes into finding the right candidate(s) for the roles and after several interview(s), the team members are selected and officially onboarded into the company.
For the new team members, the first few days and weeks are exciting at WeAreGrowing Inc. As the weeks and months go by, these new team members are not “new” anymore and become “regular employees.” As WeAreGrowing Inc. continues to grow, they add more new team members and so on. Sometime in the distant future, few team members decide to leave WeAreGrowing Inc. for various reasons – join another company, higher studies, start their own venture, etc. Then WeAreGrowing Inc. become highly alert on the recent layoffs and in a move to not lose the team members plans to meet them. HR and managers talk to the team members about how much the company values them and promises that the company will continue to grow. Yet the team members share that their plans to move on were made months ago and felt that their personal and professional growth was stagnant for sometime and were not growing at WeAreGrowing Inc.
There seems to be a long drought in team engagement between when new team members join a company and when they decide to leave. A company can convince itself that they did whatever they can at their disposal to keep the team member(s) engaged and growing. However, team members feel that the company did not engage them enough or challenge them enough or show tangible growth during the time they were with the company. Addressing the team engagement issues when the team members are almost out the door is too late!
If a company sincerely believes that the team is their biggest asset, then they should treat them as such – keep them engaged and challenged throughout the team members’ journey within the company. It’s more expensive for companies to find and hire new talent than keeping the current talent engaged and productive. Better for the company to approach their people that they can leave at any point and realize that the team members have many other career choices as well. You (HR, Managers, Founders or Leaders) just have to deliver the message and show that staying with the company is the best career choice for the team members!
What if we could have a Skills degree similar to a College degree?
A Skills degree would show all the skills you have accumulated over the years. Writing skills, editing skills, sales skills, Excel skills, technical skills, marketing skills and more skills. In a knowledge economy, our skills are our biggest assets. Skills are learnable and we can get better overtime with practice and repetition.
What skills do you have or working to be better at?
I saw this on a job vacancy post.
A college degree is great but not required. What’s more important is having the skills to do the job.
Skills are the way to go. Whether its for an Account Executive, marketing, or technical role, skills are becoming important than ever. With the speed of technological developments everyday and shortage of skilled talent across various industries, skilled professionals will continue to be in higher demand across the globe.
What skills can you gain while in college and what skills can you gain outside of college?
Meetings fill up a work day. There’s a meeting here and a meeting there. Then the day is almost done and we still have a lot of important work to be done.
With remote work being a part of our professional lives, video conferencing tools so easy to use (Zoom, Meet, Teams), and devices at our hands, we could be taking meetings from anywhere. An organized meeting with an agenda, meaningful audience engagement, and clear next steps is well worth it. However, many meetings fall off the mark and we end up just looking busy and not getting much work done. There’s a huge opportunity cost to meaningless and unproductive meetings when the team could be working on more productive and important tasks. A CBS News article stated that “Based on how much time workers said they spend in nonessential meetings as well as their salaries, the survey estimated that organizations employing 5,000 people waste around $100 million annually on unnecessary gatherings.”
What are the solution(s) then?
Meeting Purpose: Before setting up a meeting, asking ourselves is this meeting necessary, what’s the agenda, who is absolutely needed for this meeting, what can be the end result of this meeting etc. Being absolutely clear on these few questions can make a huge difference on how the meeting goes.
Meeting Audit: Once meetings have been on the calendar, conducting a meeting audit from time to time is important. A meeting audit will consist of reviewing whether this recurring meeting is still necessary, what can be changed, and if possible can the meeting be removed from the calendar completely.
Meeting Scalability: Often times, there could be meetings conflict where the same key individual(s) are needed in multiple meetings. Considering if the next individual in charge can attend the meeting instead, can the meeting be recorded, or can the video conferencing platform create an AI Summary of the meeting are some options to make better use of our time at work.
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot shares his thoughts on rare skills and the Trillion Dollar Venn Diagram Of Success (phrase credit to him).
Dharmesh shares that “You probably have a few valuable skills right now. The question is, how do you turn those skills into a successful career or company? By combining skills together. But combining any set of skills won’t necessarily get you where you want to go. You need to be strategic about which skills to acquire. Here’s my framework for combining skills to maximize your potential.”
With AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) and ChatGPT, the possibilities seem endless. In fact, it has made it very easy for us in various professions to go to ChatGPT, write a prompt, and get a good output in a span of seconds. With ChatGPT, we can have a solid starting point for an email to a client, a college essay, speech or anything that ChatGPT can help you with.
This means that the ART part is becoming more important and will continue to do so in the future. If every sales person or customer success manager in the company goes to ChatGPT to help them write emails, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). If every student in the classroom goes to ChatGPT to help them write an essay, almost all will start to sound alike (if there’s no personalization done). And the list goes on.
Our creativity, personality, uniqueness, authentic experiences, and human emotions are where we create meaningful connections with others in the world we live in today. Bring your authentic self to the work that you do and have that human connection. Let AI take care of the rest!
Want to be a better writer? keep writing.
Want to be a better storyteller? keep telling stories.
Want to be a better leader? keep leading.
Want to be a better creative? keep getting creative.
Want to be better negotiator? keep negotiating.
Want to be a better coach? keep coaching.
Want to be a better teacher? keep teaching.
Want to be a better manager? keep managing.
Want to be a better mentor? keep mentoring.
Want to be better skilled at any craft? Keep at it.
Prioritize and work on the craft that you want to become the best in the world at.
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