Frequently Asked Questions about the Academy
To sign up for The Seller Doer Academy please contact Betty at [email protected] or 1-800-946-1734.
Please note as of this time, the Academy is open only to companies NOT individuals, however this may change in the future.
Our sessions contain material that is up to PDH standard for all States that require continuing education except for New York and Nebraska. Please contact us if you have specific questions about your State(s).
The reason we started The Seller-Doer Academy for Civil Engineers is because we have seen many engineers fail at developing these critical skills by trying to do so in a one-day or one weekend seminar. It doesn’t work. To develop seller doer skills an engineer must learn and develop these skills consistently over time and this is what our subscription models allows your engineers to do.
The first 9 sessions will be conducted by co-founders and chief learning consultant Jim Rogers, NRPGA, and part-time instructor Anthony Fasano, P.E. As the Academy grows, outside qualified speakers will be introduced if we feel they will meet or exceed the learning needs of our members.
If you have a topic or speaker you would like to see featured in the Academy, please contact Betty at [email protected]. We create our schedule based on input from our Academy members, and we would are always open to input and recommendations.
You may have your own idea of what a seller-doer is, but let’s take a minute to synch up on the term. We use the term seller-doer to describe professionals who are highly capable of delivering client work, and are now ready to take a more active role in growing the business. Which means more visibility at conferences to generate leads, more responsibility for developing new opportunities at new or existing clients. Basically, professionals who are ready to step up their business development efforts or get more out of the time they already spend. In many firms, these are professionals in their early thirties through mid-forties. If that’s what came to mind for you, then we’re on the right page. That said, if you want to sharpen the skills of your most experienced sell-doers or have them help develop your next generation of seller-doers, we welcome them in the academy as well.
Good candidates for the academy are good performers of client work who can contribute more to growing the business. If you find yourself wondering if it makes sense for some of your marketing and business development folks to participate, then we think that’s fantastic; because that will create opportunities for collaborative learning. Because those folks work together to generate revenue, it is of benefit to have them attend the webinars and work on case studies together. Not only will they be able to collaborate in sharing ideas and best practices, they will be able to work in teams on real-live case studies drawn from the real work that they perform week to week, for example, proposal writing. Here’s how it will work. Your group of participants might attend a two-part webinar on writing winning proposals. A takeaway assignment from that webinar will be to apply the principles learned to the next proposal. In a subsequent, call, we might step through the proposal and debrief the activity.
There are few different pricing models for the Academy and if you are interested in pricing, please contact us through the phone number at the top of the website or our contact page. However you may want to check out our next FAQ on figuring out your ROI.
If within 18 months of beginning the program your firm was to win $500,000 in work that you might not have otherwise won, your investment in the academy will have paid for itself by a factor of 5. That’s a 400% yield on investment. If someone told you, you could earn a 400% yield on a cash investment in 18 months, you would beg, borrow, and steal every dime you could find and put it in that investment.
And to be honest, $500,000 in new fees is a pretty modest goal. For many firms, that’s only winning one, two, or three proposals that you might not have otherwise won.
But here’s the thing. When you improve your skills and processes, you aren’t just winning $500,000 in extra business. That number will multiply year over year, as will your return on investment. You will sustain your performance over time.
The topics will change to stay up to date with industry trends, however some of our core curriculum topics will include writing superior proposals and cover letters that stand out, how to network and build relationships, how to communicate effectively with existing and prospective clients, how to identify the right opportunities, and more...
The program is continuous and webinars will be given on a monthly basis with periodic debriefing or group coaching calls. While your staff will have a yearly membership, there is no “end” to the program. It is a continuous learning system. Therefore we typically won’t repeat specific webinars, unless they are updated with new information. At the end of the year, you can decide whether your staff will continue and/or you want to subscribe additional seller-doers to the Academy.
One of the great advantages of our system is that you do not physically need to attend training. It is virtual. The industry term for real-time remote learning is “synchronous distance learning” because we conduct it in real time. We make it available for your academy members on demand in case someone misses a session and needs a chance to catch up. They’ll need to do that within 30 days, however, as it won’t stay available forever, once we move onto the next webinar. Part of the value of this system is that your folks participate at the same time, which opens the door to collaborative learning.
The other advantage that the Academy provides is that we schedule monthly webinars and group calls. Because the learning is in smaller chunks of 60-90 minutes, they will not be taken away from client work for full days. The Academy doesn’t replace all of the existing investment you make in training, e.g., conferences, public training or webinars, or internal training. It means, though, that there is a monthly commitment to ‘sharpening the saw,’ as Stephen Covey called it in his masterpiece, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
By setting aside time each month (to be sure, in business, your folks should be doing something weekly), there is a chance that you will have a more immediate chance to put the knowledge to work on the job. What’s more, you will see a motivation and performance boost just from attending the training itself. Decades old research demonstrated and newer research confirms, that when you invest in training of your employees, their commitment to the organization increases … regardless of what the training is or whether or not the training is relevant or effective. That’s a bit scary, to tell you the truth. But it’s proven.
Many of our charter members cite in their decision-making when considering whether or not to participate in the Academy, that their staff have experienced such a performance boost when coming back from a conference or training. However, the boost tends to be short-lived, if the learning is not immediately applied and relevant. Where continuous learning programs like The Seller-Doer Academy, provide a year-over-year boost if it is relevant, applied, and reinforced.
And THAT’S where the academy has advantages over traditional training methods. It’s in the reinforcement and fine tuning that happens after the sessions are over and members have had a chance to try out new skills, techniques, ideas on the job and then be able to revisit them with one of our learning coaches, like Jim, Chris, and me. It is the ‘coaching’ element that has us most excited about what the academy offers. Without the ‘coaching’ we wouldn’t be different than most traditional training programs. The coaching in our program comes through post session exercises and the periodic group calls.
Also, because the coaching is included in the fee for the academy, you are not continually being up-charged for follow-on coaching. This enables you to accurately project your training spend for the year.
For clients who REALLY want to speed up the learning and improvement process and see more dramatic results, we do offer additional tiers of consulting that can turbocharge your business performance.