Sandler Training - April/May 2019

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WWW.CROSSROADS.SANDLER.COM / 208-429-9275 / APRIL/MAY 2019

FIND YOUR EDGE

THE TRIUMPH OF FAILURE

THE GREATEST GROWTH ONLY COMES FROM TRIBULATION

Gaining a new vantage point on the concept of failure is a hard pill to swallow. It takes throwing away your pride, your preconceived notions of ego, and designating your failures as learning experiences in your own personal journey. We end up learning so much more from failure than success. While we strive for success and celebrate it whenever we attain it, failure is the continual learning process from which we ultimately gain the most. As such, if we don’t come to embrace these experiences and learn from them, we won’t grow. In that case, life would culminate in empty, sporadic celebrations that wouldn’t leave any kind of lasting impression. But we must change the way we look at this paradox. The pain from failure can usher in the learning of a new practice or behavior, and that can lead to and create more worthwhile successes. The aim must be to fail fast, fail often, and fail in new ways. Pushing ourselves into failing situations may seem foreign to us — after all, most of us have been conditioned to seek out the pleasurable at every turn — but this is how the cycle of adult learning works. We should no longer seek to be coddled if we want to grow in our professional and personal lives. The biggest challenge comes from the level of the organization that is engaging these tribulations. Leadership and management are a critical component to building a learning culture. The biggest

challenge is to get organizations to recognize that management is a crucial component of that learning path and that we have to start at management and leadership first. We have to learn to lead by example by embracing hardship and changing the way we look at failure for the whole organization.

“ “THE AIM MUST BE TO FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN, AND FAIL IN NEW WAYS.”

The value of failure in the long run is much higher than it is in the sudden, sharp pains of the short run. Managers may point and click and expect a meaningful result in workflow that resounds at the very core of company values, but it’s not sustainable if we aren’t coaching and engaging to look at it through a different scope. We must give ourselves permission to fail in the hope of gaining productivity through others. We must carefully allow failure to happen in a controlled environment in order to enable us to allow it in a live environment. By understanding that these things

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happen, and quite frankly, they are bound to happen somewhat frequently, then employees will understand how to grow from these temporary heartaches. We can expect failure in a controlled environment because there’s no risk. When someone first learns a skill, let them take that knowledge and attempt it in a controlled environment with role-play. See how their newfound confidence in their abilities will hold up to the letdown. Ultimately, the controlled environment is a safe place to fail, stop, and begin again. This conditions us to understand that failure is okay because it is a low risk in the long run. Safe testing grounds can allow us to adapt and apply new knowledge that can lead us to understand that failure is okay when it is not a catastrophic event, which, most of the time, it won’t be. Failure can be recovered from; it is not the end of days, and it is not the end of a career. Putting together environments that allow and expect failure makes it much easier to accept when it actually happens. When these skills become a behavior or a habit, we no longer have to think about it, and it becomes muscle memory for the better. In the end, unless we allow that change to happen through failure, we won’t move it from a place of discomfort into a set of subconscious steps to success. It is imperative to come to realize these steps; we’ll need them in order to find success and Here at Sandler Training, we aren’t satisfied with seeing our clients through to their fullest potential based on face value alone. We aim to identify the roots of potential shortcomings in your business and personality so we can better understand how to address these issues. Through a series of assessments covering a wide range of team- and behavior-related aspects, we’re able to show you the specific traits and qualities to look for. Making informed and meaningful relationships with candidates isn’t always easy, and it certainly can’t be done perfectly over a quick phone interview, but, through these tests, we are able to gain deeper insight into how their psyche works in relation to some of the most important parts of your business. We take the time to cover the most integral parts of a businessperson’s abilities, the very foundation you build your company on. Looking at employee assessments allows you to determine the competency of candidates who are vying for the position. Through our Devine Inventory Library, we’re able to look at positions from the executive level to the part-time level, which provides us with a model that asks the deeper questions to get meaningful answers. The assessment aims to look objectively at

build up a system that allows for failures to push us into the growth we want to see.

If you’d like to know more about what failure can do for your business or have any other questions about the business world in general, feel free to reach out to us at 208-429-9275 or visit our website anytime at Sandler.com. We’d be happy to set you on the right track of change. –Jim Stephens

ASSESSING OUR ASSESSMENTS THE POWER OF SPECIALIZED RESULTS FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION

the positions themselves and define their value from all angles before allowing you to determine what qualities in a candidate would fit that position. This allows us to make objective decisions based on the results of assessments instead of the inherently subjective choices that come with the human experience. It is important in numerous aspects of business to have a system in place that allows you to clearly define how well something is working. You use a system for rolling out a marketing plan, so why wouldn’t you use a more intricate system for your hiring process? By developing individualized learning plans based off our assessments, we’re able to customize results for your business to help you make the most educated decisions possible. By changing the systems we use, we’re able to grow the way we think about hiring itself. That’s why we chose to offer exclusive assessments for our clients. From selection to on- boarding, development, and succession, these processes are an integral part of retaining the right employees for the job. If you don’t have a system in place quite yet, feel free to reach out to us at 208-429-9275 or visit our website at Sandler.com. We’ll see what we can do to get your organization to that next level.

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FULLY IMMERSED IN THE BUSINESS GROWING EXPERIENCE

classes or as imperative as training programs, we revolutionize every practice, from personal lives to professional endeavors, to scale businesses to a point of influence. The core of these tenets is enabling business owners to realize their place in their field and fill the gaps they need to fill to be industry leaders. It starts with having a business with a purpose. Say you’re selling paper. Your goal should not be to simply sell paper; it should be to provide the best possible service so that your customers can use that paper to positively impact the lives of others. Every business has a mantra, and we work with them to bring these goals to fruition. When we talked with Jennifer and David, the heads of 360 Immersive, we were interested in hearing how the ideas for their revolutionary services began. Their drive captured our attention from the very beginning, and we wanted to understand how their initiative of virtual reality training and simulations for businesses of all sizes came to be the successful, industry-leading staple it is today. As it turns out, they were brought together by their like-minded ideologies in their former fields. David spent

At Sandler Training, we work tirelessly with local and international companies to get their businesses to the maximum and most efficient impact on their fields. Whether it’s something as complex as sales master

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years in the marketing world, and they eventually crossed paths when Jennifer became the new vice president of sales and marketing at their organization. While working together on client relationships, they soon found themselves in a business relationship of their own, and Jennifer eventually became a partner in David’s business. What started as a simple conversation about their mutual marketing interests soon turned into a crash course on what the field of VR had to offer. Jennifer realized just how big this idea really was. David explained how his company was at the cutting edge of the technological field, and they both shared their excitement about its many possibilities. In short order, David dove into how it could benefit not only the marketing world but also business training, recruitment services, and public welfare services training for policemen, medical professionals, and more. It began to fall into place for the pair, who were brought together by the ambition to provide a much-needed and little known service to an eclectic range of professions while improving safety and group dynamics along the way. “I saw great potential in David’s business and, frankly, got bit by the entrepreneurial bug,” Jennifer explained. “It was at that moment, while we were talking, that I knew I didn’t want to work for somebody anymore. I wanted to be the boss and in control of my own destiny in an exciting field.” At their foundations, their training programs strive to get people excited to learn again. By rekindling that fire, momentum builds, and the likelihood of information retention increases. The programs also revolutionize the way we think about workplace safety, with interactive, simulated programs that put the user in the middle of an applicable learning experience while being surrounded by a safe environment in the real world.

By providing the closest thing to hands-on training while remaining in a controlled, digital environment, their clients are able to better prepare themselves for the real obstacles they will come across in their line of work, whether it’s workplace safety or how to properly perform a pit maneuver as a police officer. These are some of the advantages VR offers, and they are just the tip of the iceberg. 360 Immersive also deals in programs that utilize augmented reality, which lays an interactive digital veil over the real world. Think about watching a YouTube video on your bedroom ceiling that you can reach out and manipulate. As time goes on, these processes will become easier, and the equipment needed will integrate more and more into our daily lives. We’ll talk about that a little later when we dive into their commercial standpoint. It’s the perfect venture for our modern world, and it shows. “We have been able to work with companies from Fortune 500 businesses to places of higher education,” David explained. “New generations are

expecting a more modern interaction in the classroom, and we are able to offer that opportunity for teachers to get their students to have a more vested interest in the subject matter. A higher interest leads to a higher standard of learning for a new breed of leaders.” While that’s cause enough for the business to be successful, their technologies are utilized in all types of other businesses. We’ve always stressed this here at Sandler: Put plans in place to grow your company to its full potential by consulting with expert professionals. Jennifer and David have always been all ears when it comes to understanding how to find your niche, expand upon it, and scale your business to a successful level. For 360 Immersive, that success meant expanding beyond marketing training to more intricate areas where VR can lend a helping hand. “We’re at a point now where we can offer what we call ‘Day in the Life’ programs,” David continued. “Through

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a 360 live video simulation, you will get a better experience than technology has ever allowed before. You see the earth shaking, you see the rocks coming in, and everything starts to go dark after your trench collapses in a simulation of a construction site accident. There is no better way to tell those warning signs of a tragedy than having experienced them before, and before it’s too late in real life.” By working alongside Sandler for over a year in our sales master class program, Jennifer has realized how to sell these artificial experiences to the companies who need it most. She explained how our at-length discussions allowed her to consider the commercial viability of their products and services. You don’t have to have a full VR equipment setup to experience their training simulators, although it does help. They’ve made their programs more accessible by offering them on widely used products like iPads, iPhones, and many other mobile electronics. They are able to expand their reach and get a foot in the door for repeat business with companies that realize the merits of 360 Immersion solutions. On the topic of commercial viability, Jennifer felt confident in the direction they were headed after working on tangible action plans for their services with David and Sandler Training. “We’re talking about getting experience from creating content that focuses on scene assessment and hazard identification, so one construction site might have the same hazards as another. This is where we sell. These organizations can use them [their VR] as supplemental training aids that impact a five-person work crew the same as a 5,000-person work crew.” By making specialized content that applies to specific markets, they find clients who are ready and able to pay for their services. Many of these specialized videos can also be applied to broader fields, allowing

content to help other sectors as well. A workplace harassment video that takes place in an office can apply to similar cases in a professional sports stadium, making their services transferable. Their products are available for as little as $5 to download and are extremely valuable, marketable tools. But, as with all technology, they’ve had some hiccups along the way. Capturing the videos can raise several problems, so they created a more economical option in which clients capture film themselves. Organizations can create their own 360 live video to use after 360 Immersive does all the heavy lifting with the video editing and integration software. David explained the ease with which they are able to pull off their “Do It Together” programs and how it benefits both parties.

this experience, we can show a member of law enforcement what it’s like to be cornered as a suspect or what it’s like to experience a mental illness that may make you act erratically. On the other side, we’re able to show a potential Boise State football player what it may be like playing in front of a full stadium. We’re showing experiences in order to get a desired outcome down the road by having been already immersed in the experience.” This goes along with another tenet we trust at Sandler Training: People buy based on emotions. There is no better way to feel an emotion than by being fully involved in it from every possible angle. “Showing emotions without having the fear of real-life hazards is a huge part of what we do and a huge part of why we’re able to work with so many major players around the world,” Jennifer said. “We can change people’s realities to a better outcome by getting them prepared for the actual choices they would have to make that day. Whether it’s a CGI rendering or

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we believe a big part of confidence in sales is giving yourself permission to be an intentional leader, and that’s exactly what we passed along to Jennifer. As for David, we’ve been hard at work putting together his strategic plans for growth and stronger relationships. He explained, “When you have two people involved in a business, it is stressful. It’s so important to understand how you get along and just how you relate to each other. With that in mind, the consulting and planning has been invaluable. Moving beyond that, you need that advice on what kind of plan to put in place so we can scale the way we want to scale and go after our ultimate ambitions. I’m not sure where I’d be today without that help.” It’s important to stay proactive in your business and never stop trying to find your place in your market. Whether you’re worried about a new campaign or just looking for a general business consultation, Sandler Training has the know-how and experience to lead you out of the fog. With this technology and industry experience at their disposal, 360 Immersive was bound to be a success in their field, but they didn’t use that as a point of pride. Instead, they worked hard to keep scaling their business by reaching out to professional coaches who were able to set them on the right path to personal and professional success. To learn more about 360 Immersive and the services they can offer your business, feel free to reach out at 360Immersive.com or visit their location in Boise.

“By offering these services, which honestly really do help everybody involved to get a better understanding of how to treat the issue at hand, we are able to take that video and learn for ourselves how to help their employees.” He continued, “You’re not getting set back, either. If you can operate a smartphone, you can operate one of our cameras. Before you know it, you have a customized 360 training video for your company, and our technological challenges are minimized.” The mark of a true businessperson is utilizing problem-solving methods that not only fix the issues at hand but also leave you better off than when you started. Most problem-solving starts with a plan, which we have been lucky enough to help Jennifer and David with during our time together. From mastering planning and revolutionizing sales to putting precautions in place to avoid any pitfalls, Sandler Training has been able to help the duo turn around their business practices and open new doors of opportunity. Jennifer explained just how much our programs were able to help her grow in her leadership position. “As an ex-military person, I’ve always loved a plan. The problem is that I never had a plan in sales until I joined Sandler. This was the issue

because our product isn’t a commodity, at least not yet, so I needed expert advice on sales of this caliber. From the very first sales session, I was hooked.” Jennifer continued with a laugh, “I remember thinking ‘Just tell me what to do and I’m going to go do it.’” For Jennifer, her professional life in sales is much different than it was three years ago. She remembers coming to the abrupt realization that her sales cycle was almost two years long . Today, from a “first touch” perspective, her sales cycle is down to 45–60 days. She’s received accolades for her sales aptitude, and people view her as a trusted advisor. At Sandler Training,

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RESOURCE OF THE MONTH: EVERNOTE IN THE OFFICE OR ON-THE-GO, EVERNOTE HAS YOU COVERED

TAKE A BREAK

Simply put, many businesses would not be where they are today without Evernote. Evernote is a simple and intuitive form of cloud-based storage that allows its users to organize, create, and store files of various media types. Instead of risking the catastrophic loss that can come as the result of a crashed hard drive or a lost laptop, Evernote is software that provides its customers with full access to the cloud and can store a seemingly endless amount of information. Many businesses have taken up the company on their offer of technological salvation in order to organize their programs through its many archiving options and note- taking services, which make sharing and collaborating easier than ever. The benefits to Evernote are expansive. The company provides platforms to manage as many different areas of your life and business as you want, all while being incredibly simple to navigate. It’s not just for businesses either; from planning a vacation to figuring out how to pay for college, it is easy to organize your files on the platform to be quickly accessible later on. The most attractive feature is that its cloud can be accessed from any smartphone, tablet, or desktop, so wherever you go, Evernote will be there with you. To accompany this on-the-go feature, you can also easily sync your Evernote program with Google Drive and Microsoft Outlook. There are multiple tiers for Evernote accounts based on how comprehensive you want your program to be. If you’re looking for a basic storage system that allows for easier note taking, geo-tagging services for files, screenshotting, etc., then the free version would be more than enough for your purposes. The premium versions, however, offer a broader suite of services that can dramatically change how you run your business. Once you go behind the paywall, you are granted options for easier and more expansive sharing, ad-free usage, search options for PDFs, a backlog of notes history, and larger upload capacities. No matter what option works best for you, Evernote can take your business and personal life to the next level.

We have 20 complimentary copies of this new book to send out. If you’d like one, email joan.stephens@sandler.com or call 208-429-9275 to request your free copy!

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE

1

Fully Immersed in the Business Growing Experience Taking a Look at How Our Assessments Help Our Clients What Failing Can Mean for Your Business’s Success

2

3

7

A Look at What Evernote Has to Offer

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Nonprofit Spotlight: Idaho Voices for Children

NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT: IDAHO VOICES FOR CHILDREN

GIVING THE UNDERREPRESENTED A PLATFORM FOR CHANGE

Sometimes, with a little help, the voices of the voiceless can be heard the loudest. That’s the idea behind Idaho Voices for Children. This organization lobbies for better lives for kids and families who may not be getting the basic rights they deserve. For over two decades, this organization has focused on uniting these unheard voices and directing them toward the common goal of advancing public policies related to child care and child welfare legislation.

according to their website. Now that the two groups have joined together as a hydra for good deeds, they continue today by striving to put policies in place that will champion new and improved ways for children and families to thrive like never before. Most of the focus remains on creating policies that will make long- lasting and substantial change to the way the system works for these underrepresented citizens. Through their four steps to approaching an issue (identify, educate, advocate, and evaluate), they are able to thoroughly address the problem at hand from a scientific and academic perspective. Always cognizant of the socioeconomic boundaries that so often see poorer families left by the wayside, they pay close attention to how race and geography impact their state’s policies and seek to remove blockades that hold back opportunities for community growth. To hear more about how you can help lead the charge, you can give them a call at 208-947-4265 or visit IdahoVoices. org, where you can learn more, donate to the cause, or subscribe and stay up-to-date with their charitable works.

Legally established as a nonpartisan, nonprofit group in 2004, they have worked tirelessly to lead research, policy, and advocacy efforts to better their situation. A decade later, they joined forces with the Jannus organization, which focuses on diverse health and humanitarian efforts in order to manage a variety of community health, economic opportunity, and public policy programs,

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