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Forum Reports capture the key findings of Forum's ongoing research into best practices and skills that drive superior performance. Registering to access this portion of Forum.com also enables you to sign-up to receive any of our three monthly e-subscriptions: Sales Verdict, Leadership Truths, and Uncommon Practice.

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Featured Paper

Branded Customer Experience®

  • Uncommon Practice: What Exemplary Companies Do to Deliver a Branded Customer Experience: Countless companies every day miss their opportunity to build profits. The opportunity is there for them to grab, but they don’t. Why? Our research suggests that they don’t get the right questions lined up with the right answers on how to drive profits. For example, if you ask most executives what they think of when they think of their brand, they will reply with such words as identity, positioning, logos, and signage—but not the customer experience, which in our exemplary companies is the brand.
    (Note: This research brief is excerpted from the full report, "Exemplary Companies Research Findings". If you would like to receive a copy of the full report, email us at forum@forum.com, and please include your name, title, company, mailing address, and the number of employees in your firm.)

  • Leading the Branded Customer Experience--The Leadership Spirit Needed to Win: The challenge for many companies is to dramatically change their organizations into customer-focused enterprises. They must create an entirely different culture. This requires leadership of the highest order. So if one is to embark on this journey, what is the leadership road map? What are the key things leaders need to do if they are going to build customer loyalty through a branded customer experience delivered through their people? This paper examines four critical leadership actions.

  • Loyalty by Design: Others have pursued customer loyalty with greater commitment, but the key questions still lie unanswered: How do you create a level of customer satisfaction that is so strong that customers become your best salespeople? How do you create advocates?

  • People First: Creating a powerful customer experience requires the full and continual commitment of the people responsible for making it happen. Learn how putting your people first can create great experiences for customers.

  • Triad Power: Creating and delivering Branded Customer Experiences is a result of aligning the whole organization behind the customer proposition and key executives combining resources, budgets, and competencies to implement organizational transformation. Learn how to marshall your resources.

  • From Products to Experiences: The emergence of what we call Branded Product Experiences that bring product and service together to create real value for customers. Find out to apply the Branded Customer Experience® to a product sale.

e-Learning

  • The Forum Report: e-Learning Approaches to Implementation: A mix of classroom and web is being embraced as the future of workplace learning, but the best methods for implementing a blended solution are not yet well understood. Flexibility, cultural fit, and a smooth bridge from traditional to web-based learning were emphasized by the eleven Fortune 1000 participants in a focused study conducted by The Forum Corporation.

  • The Forum Report: e-Learning Adoption Rates and Barriers: An increasing number of companies are adopting e-Learning. But in their rush to take advantage of e-Learning’s benefits and promises, companies are finding that there are significant barriers to adoption, according to a Forum Corporation study of 144 U.S. companies. This report examines those barriers.

  • e-Learning: A Forum Perspective Brief: This paper examines the e-learning landscape and how e-learning fits into the 5 principles of adult learning.
    To request a copy of the full white paper call: 800.523.5211.

Leadership & Management

Sales and Service
  • Gaining Competitive Advantage Through Service: The Customer Service Assessment: Based on Forum's latest customer service research, this assessment tool allows you to quickly size up your company's current level of customer service in relation to that of other companies. Use this tool to begin identifying ways to gain maximum competitive advantage through customer service.

  • The Financial Value of Customer Service: Superior customer service can unlock great financial value. This tool provides a way to quickly size up the potential value of improving customer service in your company.

  • How Customers View Cross-Selling: Leading companies provide a service experience that not only satisfies customers with their current purchase, but also opens the door to future purchases. This report, based on Forum's latest research, identifites some of the key service rep behaviors that make the difference.

  • Roadmaps for Delivering Winning Service: Customer Service Research Study: New research identifies the top three skills customer service representatives must have in order to build customer loyalty, increase sales and lower customer acquisition costs.

  • At a Loss For Words: How Salespeople Squander Conversations with Senior-Level Customers, and What to Do About It: Having conversations with senior business leaders presents a new and difficult challenge requiring superior skill, preparation, and knowledge that only the most accomplished salespeople have mastered. High-performing salespeople are experts at using communication skills in sophisticated ways, so that their customers see them as adding exceptional value and insight to every conversation. Getting and staying at the top requires an understanding that the audience is unique, and the means to the end are different. The stakes are higher, and so are the expectations.

  • A Cure for the Common Sales Force: It’s not just what – but how – you sell that wins in the increasingly competitive world of pharmaceutical sales: The paper looks at the unique and challenging selling environment pharmaceutical salespeople now face, due to increasingly stricter policies set by legal and regulatory agencies, as well as individual medical centers. Forum reviews traditional selling practices in an environment that often provides sales reps less than 2 minutes to pitch their target. We then illustrate the benefits of taking an entirely different sales approach - one that focuses on gaining the doctor’s trust and confidence, rather than simply imparting the details of the newest drug and dropping off product samples.

  • Strategic Account Management: How Account Leaders Build Alliances with Key Clients: Companies are discovering that in order to make their strategic account management strategies work, they need a new breed of salesperson, a highly skilled account team, and an organization fully committed to the strategy. New research by The Forum Corporation provides fresh insight into what the successful SAM leaders are doing right.
  • Selling in a Recession: Sales Force and Sales Management Strategies for Building Business in a Tough Economy: The sales organizations that will survive and even thrive in these difficult times are employing recession-fighting strategies that are geared to hold the line, take share, and position them to blast out ahead of the competition as the economic pendulum swings in the direction of recovery and growth. These strategies are sensibly focused on the three drivers of sales performance: retaining existing customers, growing existing customer relationships, and acquiring new customers.

  • The Forum Report: Strategic Account Management: Getting it to Work: Many companies are struggling to derive value from their strategic account management programs. A study by The Forum Corporation finds that the lack of effective training, a number of organizational barriers, and focus on short-term goals limit the success of many companies' strategic account management programs. Learn the difference between SAM theory and successful SAM practice.

  • Sales Training Market Report: Learn about trends in the sales training industry.

  • Sales Effectiveness in World-Class Organizations: This report examines how sales managers, vice presidents of sales, and other leaders responsible for sales staff development view their situations and equip their sales organizations to compete and win in the future.

General

  • Putting Learning to Work: Principles and Strategies for Improving Performance: Companies are facing an increasingly challenging business climate, marked by unprecedented instability and uncertainty. The winners in the future economic environment will be those companies and individuals best able to learn quickly the skills required to thrive in the emerging business climate. This report focuses on two competency areas that we believe will continue to be critical: leadership and management competencies, and customer-relationship competencies.
    (Note: This research brief is excerpted from the full, 92-page report, "Principles of Workplace Learning: Insights and Tools for Performance Improvement". If you would like to receive a copy of the full report, email us at forum@forum.com, and please include your name, title, company, mailing address, and the number of employees in your firm.)

  • Putting Learning to Work: Tools for Designing Effective Blended Learning: The way companies approach learning has changed. Employees and managers seek greater speed, relevance, and flexibility; meanwhile, technology offers a myriad of new delivery options. These days, the rules for workplace learning are up in the air. Research by The Forum Corporation has identified three frameworks that guide the effective design of blended learning solutions. In this report, we summarize the design tools and offer examples of how Forum has used them with clients to increase the power of workplace learning.
    (Note: This research brief is excerpted from the full, 92-page report, "Principles of Workplace Learning: Insights and Tools for Performance Improvement". If you would like to receive a copy of the full report, email us at forum@forum.com, and please include your name, title, company, mailing address, and the number of employees in your firm.)
  • How Do You Take Your Learning? Creating the right "menu" for your company: This paper examines five organizational learning strategies and provides help in understanding which strategy may be right for your company.

  • Driving Business Results Through Workplace Learning: Forum's Approach to Learning Strategy: Companies need to leverage learning strategically, so that their people are equipped to respond quickly, execute effectively, and compete successfully in pursuit of their most critical business goals. This paper looks at how to create an organizational learning strategy that provides the best and most efficient way to equip and develop people to respond quickly and effectively in a constantly changing environment, so that the company can compete successfully.

  • Running Training Like a Business: A Look Ahead (excerpted from the book Building Learning Capability Through Outsourcing): This case describes how traditional training operations must be restructured so that they operate like a business and keep up with the ever-changing business landscape.

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e-Subscription Archive

Missed an Issue? Read it here.

Leadership Truths
November, Vol. 1 Issue 6
October, Vol. 1 Issue 5
September, Vol. 1 Issue 4
August, Vol. 1 Issue 3
 July, Vol. 1 Issue 2
June, Vol. 1 Issue 1

Sales Verdict
November, Vol. 1, Issue 6
October, Vol. 1 Issue 5
September, Vol. 1 Issue 4
August, Vol. 1 Issue 3
July, Vol. 1 Issue 2
June, Vol. 1 Issue 1

Uncommon Practice
November, Vol. 1 Issue 6
October, Vol. 1 Issue 5
September, Vol. 1 Issue 4
August, Vol. 1 Issue 3
July, Vol. 1 Issue 2
June, Vol. 1 Issue 1

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