Recently I sat in a dealer advisory meeting, surrounded by a group of about 15 dealer development managers.  The fact that they were from dealerships, verses franchises, stores or distributors is irrelevant to this message.

The conversation at the table had been around frustrations at the dealerships with sales being lost to competitors.  It seems that when a customer purchased a core product from the dealer, they often went to other specialty stores for the components that supported the core product.  Why?  Because the counter sales people did not have the component-level knowledge to present the supporting component options to the buyer.  Consequently, there was little to no chance of capturing the entire sale by that dealership.

It was at this point that a dealer development manager at the end of the table slammed his fist down hard on the table (which startled more than just a few people) and vehemently exclaimed, "Damn it!  What we need is a way to make it easier to be smarter!"

There you have it--a pearl of priceless value!  We need to make it easier for our channel to be smarter.  How do we do that?  By delivering knowledge and information in a contextual format, i.e. within the context of their work.  And by moving training away from an "event" to a "just-in-time format" whenever possible.  The information and knowledge our channels need to do more, sell more and service better should never by more than a click away from their work.  For a complete treatise on Contextual Performance Improvement please see my posting in this blog entitled "Contextual Performance Improvement, the Next Revolution".

When you examine how you can further impact the performance of people in your channel remember the edict from the frustrated dealer development manager: "We need to make it easier to be smarter!"