Recently, I had the privilege of leading a sales education program for a group of private bankers. The group was quite diverse, coming from: Greece, Ukraine, Brazil, Belgium, Spain, Holland and Luxembourg.

On the second day, we considered a follow-up application to SST, the Z Problem Solving Model, which is illustrated in the full text article available by clicking the link below:

To practice the Z problem solving method, we applied it to the US economic crisis. This was September 23, 2008 and the crisis had just hit the news. In our humble view, we came up with an approach, which we believe was both more balanced and superior to what we understood from Bush, Paulson and Bernanke, who basically said: "We have a financial crisis. Trust us and give us a check for $700 billion."

By Matthijs Van der Want, ISPO Consulting

Some years ago, on a referral from McKinsey Consulting, we at Fortis Bank came in contact with PfP Consulting partners Harry Koolen and Arnie Tilden. Fortis is a large continental European bank headquartered in Belgium, and I was leading a change management program. The aim of our effort was to improve the client orientation of around 250 front-office personnel of the different dealing rooms across Europe. In this program, different areas of improvement were addressed, like sales performance measurements, sales people and sales management behavior, communication, evaluations and rewards. Our relationship deepened after PfP delivered a successful sales skills training program.

Although the client business was strongly improved after one year of implementation, we sensed that a training initiative on sales leadership would be essential for continuing the success of the change. Therefore, we developed together an Adaptable Leadership program with the principal objective of improving the ability of sales leaders to coach their sales teams. In fact, this program was such a success that it surprised me. For the first time after having organized a training, I received only positive feedback, and not only from the participants.