As the marketing director for The Steve Trautman Co., I am amazed at how hard some of our clients work to influence and bring good knowledge transfer programs into their organizations. These people create sophisticated PowerPoint presentations, arrange for colleagues and decision-makers to attend meetings, and generally champion the cause of preserving the “secret sauce” of their top talent. These people are invaluable partners to us and become knowledge transfer advocates within their companies because they were the first to find us, vet us, and come quickly up to speed on our 3-step Knowledge Transfer Solution.

We have learned that most of these “internal influencers” possess several key talents that contribute to their success:

  • Internal influencers feel the pain of a workforce that is not fully prepared. For example, they (or their leadership team) are experiencing the threat of an aging/retiring workforce, or bringing in new hires who need to ramp-up to specific skills quickly, or facing job skill changes brought on by new tech roll outs or reorganizations, or seeing work that is not consistent within a team or across the corporation.
  • Internal influencers have been tasked with (or have stepped up to take on) the role of “finding a solution—any solution.” For example, an answer to their business problem is needed badly, but no one in their organization knows specifically how it will be solved. Influencers need to research possible solutions and are charged with taking on due diligence to vet potential solution providers.
  • Internal influencers are diligent. The marketplace for knowledge transfer solutions (such as ours) is not populated with a great number of solution providers, so they have to look far and wide to find a quality program that meets their needs. We have learned that, by the time they get to our website, they have looked at a lot of “knowledge transfer people” but rarely people who are in the business of offering a real, step-by-step solution.
  • Internal influencers “see” the path to approval. When bringing us to their organization, they understand the various hoops one must jump through—including executive buy-in, legal, and accounts payable—and have the organizational knowledge and/or political capital to get through these hoops.

I have been very motivated to provide assistance to these internal influencers—because the easier they are able to state their case to colleagues, the faster we can engage and begin the process of replicating their top talent so that their workforce is ready to roll.

 

Free Resources to Support Knowledge Transfer Internal Influencers

I am therefore pleased to unveil a newly-improved section on our website called Present To Your Decision Makers. In this part of our website, people who wish to, well, present to their decision makers will find various materials to help vet our program quality, call meetings, and make the case to bring us into their organization. Theses materials—which were created with input from successful internal influencers at major organizations—include:

  • 3, 5, and 15-minute PowerPoint presentation templates that you can use for a polished, pre-written presentation.
  • A pre-written email inviting colleagues and executives to the presentation, introducing the reason for knowledge transfer in the organization.
  • A checklist to scrutinize the quality of ours and any competitors’ knowledge transfer programs.
  • An electronic one-page brochure to have as a leave-behind or share via email.
  • An “elevator speech” in case you are asked point-blank about us.
  • A series of videos that introduce and detail our 3-step Knowledge Transfer Solution in case someone wants to hear the explanation in Steve’s own words.

I invite you to check it out here!