I went to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce presentation today where the topic was "Learn How To Outsell, Out Manage and Outperform Your Competition". It was put on by James McEntire of James McEntire Consulting (who doesn't have a website; we talked about that one).

During the presentation, a big topic discussed was training the people that work for you, because a big part of outdoing your competition resides in how good your customer service is. Many companies take a big chance on this one because they don't fully train their employees and, therefore, don't know if everyone is on the same page or not.

He first gave six questions that every manager needs to answer for themselves in regards to their employees:

1. All employees perform each aspect of their job with a high degree of excellence and consistency 100% of the time.

2. Results are somewhat predictable because training and skills are consistent. There are no fires to put out at work because our results are predictable.

3. Each supervisor would give a similar answer for each question or problem.

4. Each employee would give a similar answer for each question or problem.

5. Client treatment is similar, no matter who the client deals with in our company or department.

6. All staff members know what is considered good performance or good attitude.

His premise is that, if you can't answer all 6 of these in the affirmative, your employees need training. One person in the room actually had an ah-ha moment, saying that she spends time each month training the employees, but she's never done the same with any of her management staff because she'd never thought about it, but was going to change that pretty quickly.

And that's why one goes to seminars, because there's always something else to learn. Everyone needs some type of training.