82 Courses

Business Communication Skills: Communicating effectively in the workplace   Course Description   Course Description Poor communication and presentation of business information breeds poor decisions. We may be masters of the spreadsheet and wizards with a project plan, but we are not always brilliant at communicating or presenting the results of our work Management meetings can, sometimes, be tedious and uninspiring, where managers compete for excuses to avoid attending! A good manager is someone who understands performance and can present information in a way that enables others to understand what the issues are and make correct decisions. A good manager can cut through the fog of numbers to make a clear point and assist others to make effective decisions. In “Business Communication Skills” we present tools and structures that will help you plan and deliver your message effectively and facilitate group meetings to achieve a useful outcome. Topics covered include the principles of good communication; planning your communication; structuring your message; and facilitating business meetings, including online meetings. We hope you enjoy it.   Key Learning Participants in this course will learn: The principles of effective communication Planning your communication – message, audience, medium, structure, call to action. How to structure your communication Language patterns to help get your message across How to facilitate Business Meetings The Skills of a good facilitator The rules for a well-structured meeting Planning your meeting agenda How to facilitate an online meeting What to look for when facilitating a session Tools you can use in facilitation. Evaluating your Facilitation   Curriculum L1 Effective Communication L2 Planning your Communication 1 L3 Planning your Communication 2 L4 Planning your Communication 3 L5 Exercise: Stakeholder Analysis L6 Facilitating Business Meetings L7 Planning your Meeting Agenda L8 As a facilitator what should I look for? L9 Tools you can use in facilitation L10 Facilitation Tools L11 Exercise: Planning your Agenda Resource: Tools to help you communicate and facilitate     Pre-Course Requirements None     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Selling Skills for Professionals: Part 1 Prospecting   Course Description   Copyright Ross Maynard 2021   Course Description Welcome to Selling Skills for Professionals: Part 1 Prospecting. If you are an accountant, a lawyer, a consulting engineer, a surveyor, an actuary, a management consultant, an events organiser, an HR professional or any other form of professional businessperson, and you need to identify and develop new clients, then this course is for you This is part 1 of a two-part course on selling skills for professionals. In Part 1 I cover prospecting, that is identifying potential future clients and making the initial approach. In Part 2 of Selling Skills for Professionals I cover the sales process once you have a make contact with a potential client. Selling Skills for Professionals covers high involvement purchases where the commitment is a significant one for the purchaser. This covers relatively expensive business investments, but also purchase agreements which the purchaser feels will have a significant impact on their business – for example engaging an accountant or a lawyer, or a management consultant, and so on. With a high involvement purchase, the client typically will consider a range of alternatives; will review a variety of information sources; and will evaluate product and service attributes in detail. This means that there is a relatively high barrier to surmount to get the potential client’s attention. A solid approach to prospecting and a well-structured sales process can increase that conversion rate and enhance your success in securing clients who will remain with you for the long term. That is the purpose of this course.   I hope you enjoy the course.     Key Learning Points  On completion of the course, delegates will be able to: Describe the scope and purpose of sales prospecting for professional services Understand the five rules of selling professional services Develop a branding statement for themselves and their organisation Define the criteria for the clients they wish to target Appreciate the importance of client pain points and how to identify them Prepare materials for prospecting Create a cold calling script for prospecting Write a cold email or LinkedIn message to prospects including a strong subject line Understand the sorts of questions they can use to stimulate client engagement in a discussion Move prospects onto the next stage of the selling process     Curriculum Module 1: First Principles in Selling Professional Services Lesson 1: The Five Rules of Selling Professional Services Lesson 2: The Five Rules of Selling Professional Services Lesson 3: Branding   Module 2: Getting Ready to Prospect Lesson 4: Identifying Prospects Lesson 5: Client Pain Points and the Purpose of Prospecting Lesson 6: Preparing to Prospect   Module 3: Making the Approach Lesson 7: Seven Seconds to make an Impact Lesson 8: Crafting the Message: Cold Calling Lesson 9: Crafting the Message: Cold Email Lesson 10: Sample Scripts for Cold Email  Lesson 11: Trigger Questions Lesson 12: Getting Ready to Sell: The Next Stage  Lesson 13: Key Learning Points in Prospecting     Pre-Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Selling Skills for Professionals: Part 2 Making the Sale   Course Description   Copyright Ross Maynard 2021   Course Description Welcome to Selling Skills for Professionals: Part 2 Making the Sale.   In Part 1 of Selling Skills for Professionals I covered prospecting, that is identifying potential future clients and making the initial approach. In this course, Part 2 of Selling Skills for Professionals, I cover the sales process – converting a prospect into a client. In Selling Skills for Professionals: Part 2 Making the Sale, I look at the skills you need for selling professional services and how to create a series of webinars to build prospects’ interest. I then cover a five-step sales process in detail: Understand the current situation Surface the pain points Exploring the impacts of the pain points Shape the future state Close the sale   The course also covers why people buy professional services, and why they might not buy; and it shows how to deal with objections.   Selling professional services is not like selling a car, or solar panels. It’s about building a relationship with a prospect as a professional advisor; coaching them through the challenges facing them; and offering services tailored to their needs which will help the prospect make tangible improvements.   If you want to know how to sell professional services successfully, this is the course for you.   I hope you enjoy the course.     Key Learning Points  On completion of the course, delegates will be able to: Describe a five-stage sales process for professional services Identify the core skillset needed for selling professional services Deploy best practice when creating webinars to engage prospects Explore a prospect’s current situation on an online video call Identify a prospect’s pain points and explore their root causes and impacts Coach a prospect to visualise the future state they would like to get to be resolving the problems identified Handle objections surfaced as the prospect moves towards closing the sale Understand why people buy professional services, and why they don’t buy Reduce buyer’s remorse and plan to develop the client relationship after the sale     Curriculum Module 1: The Foundations for Selling Professional Services Lesson 1: The Purpose of Prospecting Lesson 2: The Selling Professional Services Skillset Lesson 3: Moving Beyond Prospecting Lesson 4: Script for the Webinar Follow-Up Call   Module 2: Building a Case for the Sale Lesson 5: No Pain No Gain Lesson 6: Building a Case: Initial Diagnosis Lesson 7: Building a Case: Root Causes Lesson 8: Building a Case: Impacts Lesson 9: Building a Case: Shaping the Future State Lesson 10: Building a Case: The Gap   Module 3: Closing the Sale Lesson 11: Selling is about Change Lesson 12: A Time to Close  Lesson 13: Closing (At Last)   Module 4: Evasion and Objections Lesson 14: Evasion Lesson 15: Handling Objections Lesson 16: Specific Example of Objections Part 1 Lesson 17: Specific Example of Objections Part 2   Module 5: After the Sale Lesson 18: Aftercare Lesson 19: Key Learning Points     Pre-Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes   Course Description   Copyright Ross Maynard 2021   Course Description Welcome to PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes.   Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for nearly 35 years, and I am sure you are familiar with it, and have experienced many PowerPoint presentations – some good; many extremely tedious! Creating a business presentation in PowerPoint presents a number of challenges and there is a danger of “death by PowerPoint”. I recently attended a meeting which was supposed to be a planning discussion but which the person leading the meeting insisted on introducing with a PowerPoint presentation of 60 slides – mostly bullet points! We were hardly in the mood for action planning after that assault on our senses.  PowerPoint is good for presenting business results or for a training course, but you need to plan your slideshow carefully to avoid bullet-point boredom and to keep your audience engaged and interested. And that is the purpose of this course – to teach you PowerPoint techniques which you may not be familiar with, and which will help you improve the impact of your business presentations.   Less is more in a slide show so it is important to use techniques and effects which will help engage your audience and draw their attention to the points that matter.  In “PowerPoint for Business in 60 Minutes”, I cover six key topics that will help you produce more impactful business presentations: The best slide transitions and animations for business presentations The morph transition to make the narration of an agenda, or similar list, or a team photograph extremely slick and professional The Zoom effect to create a summary slide with hyperlinks to zoom into the section that you or your audience choose How to animate charts to highlight the key points you want to bring out How to embed Excel tables with slicers into PowerPoint, and why PowerPoint is not developed enough to make this useful for a business presentation How to turn your PowerPoint presentation into a video. This is the technique I am most often asked how to do.   This is not a full “PowerPoint from scratch” course: it assumes familiarity of Microsoft’s ubiquitous programme. Instead, the course takes only 1 hour of your time to focus on key techniques that can help you improve the impact of the presentations you create.   I hope you enjoy the course.     Key Learning Points  On completion of the course, delegates will be able to: Identify the most useful slide transitions and animations for business presentations Use the morph transition to draw the audience’s attention Create a “zoom” summary slide to jump to user-selected sections of slides Animate charts to highlight key points Embed a Microsoft Excel table in a PowerPoint slide Create a video with commentary of their PowerPoint presentation     Curriculum Lesson 1: Transitions and Animations Lesson 2: The Morph Transition Lesson 3: Zoom Lesson 4: Animating Charts Lesson 5: Excel Tables and Slicers in PowerPoint (or Not!) Lesson 6: Making a PowerPoint Video     Pre-Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel     Questions What slide effect allows you to give the illusion of moving around a larger “page”? The Wipe transition. The Dissolve transition. The Push transition. The Fly-In animation   What does “Zoom” in PowerPoint allow you to do? Zoom creates the illusion of “zooming in” on a particular part of a slide Zoom creates a summary slide with hyperlinks to the individual slides or sections contained in the summary Zoom creates a smooth object animation from one slide to another to animate, for example, an agenda or timeline Zoom is used to highlight areas of a chart or graphic to draw the audience’s attention   What is the main problem with embedding a Microsoft Excel table with slicers into PowerPoint? The slicers do not work, and the table cannot be manipulated, in presentation mode in PowerPoint The table cannot be opened or manipulated in PowerPoint slide view Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint are incompatible with each other The file size created is too large for most business PCs to handle   When seeking to create an MP4 video file from a PowerPoint presentation, why is it advisable to record the commentary separately? PowerPoint’s built-in recording facility is unreliable and frequently crashes It’s much quicker to record the audio separately and then insert it into PowerPoint and save as a video file Separate video editing software needs to be used to improve the video’s look and sound where the audio is recorded directly in PowerPoint It removes the stress of commentating “live” on the presentation while recording it, and allows any mistakes and errors to be cut out  

Business Finance 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Business Accounting and Finance   Course Description   Course Description Three are three main reasons for business failure – an under-skilled management team; ineffective marketing; and poor financial management. Every manager, or student of management, requires a good grasp of business finance. This course will help.  Business finance concerns the management of the monetary resources of an organisation. There are two aspects to this: Raising the money to invest in the business Managing that investment properly to generate a return   Raising the money is about having an attractive proposition and managing the risk to investors. Managing the investment is about the financial controls and reporting of the business. This course covers the three main financial reports; financial performance indicators; and investment analysis.  This course will give you a good grasp of the key principles and issues in business finance.     Key Learning Participants in this course will learn: The history of business accounting Why businesses fail The two main purposes of business finance and accounting The key principles of business finance and what they mean What debits and credits are The three key financial statements for an organisation What the Balance Sheet tells you What the Income Statement (also called the Profit and Loss Account) tells you What the Cashflow Statement tells you Key financial performance indicators in business Analysing business investments   Curriculum L1 What is business finance? L2 Why businesses fail L3 The Principles of Business Finance Part 1 L4 The Principles of Business Finance Part 2 L5 The Balance Sheet L6 The Income Statement L7 The Cashflow Statement L8 A Business Finance Exercise L9 Financial Performance Indicators L10 Investment Analysis L11 Investment Analysis Exercise L12 Key Learning Points in Business Finance   Pre-Course Requirements None     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Dealing with Angry or Rude Customers   Course Description   Copyright Ross Maynard 2021   Course Description If you work in customer service in any way, then, from time to time, you are going to have to deal with angry or rude customers. This course will help you manage those stressful situations and support the customer as best you can. Anger is a normal and relatively common emotion caused by a perceived hurt or provocation. In some cases a customer’s anger or rude behaviour may be driven by the failings of your organisation or its products and services. In other cases, the problem may be outside your control but you still have to deal with the impact. In this course we look at anger in a customer service situation and how to deal with it. We review the nature and causes of anger; we look at how poor customer service can cause anger and what you can do to prepare your organisation to deal with anger. We cover the warning signs for anger and present a 12 step approach to dealing with an angry customer. We cover questions and short scripts that can help you start a discussion with an angry customer, and we consider why customers might be rude. Finally we look at managing the stress of dealing with an angry customer and finish the course with a review of the key learning points. I hope you find the course helpful.   Key Learning Points  On completion of the course, delegates will be able to: Understand the nature and causes of anger as an emotion. Consider their objectives when dealing with an angry customer. Help prepare their organisation for dealing with angry customers. Identify appropriate customer service metrics Work through a series of steps to deal with an angry customer. Use questions and short scripts to try to help a customer bring their anger under control . Consider why a customer might be rude, and how to deal with that rudeness. Understand how to manage the stress of dealing with angry or rude customers.     Curriculum L1: Anger as an Emotion L2: Your Objectives when Dealing with Anger L3: Poor Customer Service L4: Preparing your Organisation  L5: Warning Signs and What Not to Do L6: The 12 Steps to Dealing with Anger L7: Example Scripts for Angry Customers L8: Dealing with Rude Customers L9: Dealing with Stress, and Key Learning Points     Pre-Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements     Additional Resources Copy of customer behaviour policy     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in business processes and organisation development. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Description Microsoft Excel has hundreds, if not thousands, of functions and features. This course aims to cover some of the best – that is the ones I find most useful. In “Adventures in Excel”, I cover the simple-to-use but powerful functions that I use most often: Basic features including products and powers Key date functions including the calculation of due dates and days past due Generating random numbers and random dates The new IFS functions (new to Office365) Text functions The most useful logical functions and IS functions How to create a drop-down list The new XLOOKUP function Pivot tables   These functions are easy to use, and, unless your role is extremely specialised, they are probably the ones you’ll use 90% of the time. I hope you find the course helpful.   Learning Outcomes Participants in this course will learn: Basic Excel functions including SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, PRODUCT, POWER and SQRT Useful date functions including TODAY, EOMONTH, EDATE, and DAYS Generating random numbers using RAND and RANDBETWEEN; generating random dates; and randomly picking an item from a list or table The new RANDARRAY function in Office365 The new IFS functions in Office365 including AVERAGEIFS, MAXIFS, MINIFS, COUNTIFS, and SUMIFS Text functions including TRIM, LOWER, UPPER, PROPER, LEFT, MID, RIGHT, FIND, TEXTJOIN and CONCATENATE Logical functions AND, OR, and NOT and IS functions ISTEXT, ISNUMBER, ISBLANK and ISERROR How to create a drop-down list The new SORT and FILTER functions in Office365 VLOOKUP and the new XLOOKUP function How to create a Pivot table and analyse data with one     Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements.   Additional Resources Course Spreadsheet with the examples covered.     About Ross Ross Maynard is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK. He is director of Ideas2Action Process Excellence Ltd and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant and facilitator. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses for accountants. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

New Excel Functions   Course Description   Ross Maynard     Description In the second half of 2020 Microsoft released a significant upgrade to the most used spreadsheet programme in the world. Microsoft Excel now offers the ability to handle dynamic arrays – functions that return a range of results that update as the source data changes. In this course, we discuss the power of dynamic arrays and introduce the new functions. The functions I am going to cover are: RANDARRAY- creating a table of random numbers or random dates UNIQUE – identifying the distinct items in a list SEQUENCE – listing numbers with a set interval SORT and SORTBY – new ways of dynamically sorting data FILTER – building the ability to filter data into formulae XLOOKUP – replacing VLOOKUP with greater flexibility IFS and SWITCH making it easier to construct IF statements The new CONCAT, and TEXTJOIN text functions   If you have an earlier version of Microsoft Excel then these functions will not be available to you and this course might not be for you. But if you do have a subscription to Office365 – either personally or through your work – I think you will find this course extremely useful.         Learning Outcomes Participants in this course will learn: What the new dynamic arrays feature in Microsoft Excel means How the new RANDARRAY function works How the new UNIQUE function works How the new SEQUENCE function works How the new SORT and SORTBY functions work How the new FILTER function works How the new XLOOKUP function can replace VLOOKUP How to build IF statements with the new IFS function How the new SWITCH function works How the new TEXTJOIN function can replace CONCATENATE and CONCAT How the new functions can be used in management reporting     Course Requirements There are no pre-course requirements.   Additional Resources Course Spreadsheet with the examples covered.       About Ross Ross Maynard is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK. He is director of Ideas2Action Process Excellence Ltd and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant and facilitator. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses for accountants. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

The Birth of the Industrial Revolution in Britain 1707 to 1830   Course Description   Introduction The Industrial Revolution started in Britain in the eighteenth century. A number of factors converged to create the conditions for developments in industry and science. Agricultural improvements created a cadre of wealthy landowners with money to invest. Improved educational opportunities, particularly in Scotland, created a broader set of young people with ideas and ambition. Greater religious freedom allowed individuals of talent to develop businesses. Interest in science and technology blossomed and the birth of the coffee house culture brought people with ideas into the orbit of those with money. But it was not all rosy. The new culture of ideas and experimentation was almost entirely limited to men. A woman’s place was seen to be in the home. At the same time the slave trade flourished providing much of the wealth for investment and, shamefully, Britain was a key facilitator in this odious business – and there were few voices of dissent at the time. And the poor lived short and brutish lives of hard physical work in grim conditions with an inadequate diet and very little healthcare. In this course I am going to take you through the key milestones of the early industrial revolution – in the textile industry, in coal mining and iron production, in civil engineering; in the development of steam power and the birth of the railways.     Course Pre-Requisites There are no course pre-requisites.     What Students will Learn The history of the industrial revolution in Britain from 1707 to 1830 The factors that created the conditions for the industrial revolution Developments in the textile industry in the eighteenth century The development of steam as a source of power The birth of steam locomotion Developments in coal, coke and iron Civil engineering in the eighteenth century Scientific developments in the eighteenth century     Curriculum SS1 The Birth of the Industrial Revolution 6 mins SS2 The Textiles Revolution 13 min SS3 The Birth of the Steam Engine 10 mins SS4 The Age of Steam Locomotion 14 mins SS5 Fuelling the Industrial Revolution 10 mins SS6 The Engineering Revolution 6 mins SS7 The Scientific Revolution 18 mins SS8 Black Lives during the Industrial Revolution 5 mins SS9 The Birth of the Industrial Revolution 2 mins SS10 The Industrial Revolution History Quiz 19 mins   Total time: 1 hour 44 minutes     Additional Resources None     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in finance processes. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses for accountants. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel

Safeguarding Course Information   Description This course provides a guide to the safeguarding procedures that medical practices and other service providers need to have in place to guard against abuse or neglect. Safeguarding procedures are needed within doctors’ surgeries, schools, nurseries, clubs and associations and any organisation dealing with children and young people, and vulnerable adults. This is not a course about the clinical detection or escalation of safeguarding concerns The aim of the course is to help providers design the administrative procedures in place that they need for safeguarding The focus of the course is the United Kingdom, but the principles covered in the course, and the procedures presented, should apply anywhere.     Course Pre-Requisites There are no course pre-requisites.   What Students will Learn The safeguarding procedures that organisations dealing with young people and vulnerable adults need The definition of Safeguarding The types of organisation that need safeguarding procedures The responsibilities of organisations for safeguarding Sources of information on safeguarding     Curriculum 1. What is Safeguarding? 2. Who is covered by safeguarding? 3. The Responsibilities of Service Providers 4. Key Decisions for Service Providers 5. Documents relating to safeguarding 6. Registration of new service users 7. Identification of Concerns 8. Proactive Analysis of Issues 9. Collaborative Review 10. Audit of Effectiveness     Additional Resources PDFs uploaded: What_to_do_if_you_re_worried_a_child_is_being_abused.pdf (328.0 kB) Scottish Government Safeguarding Guidance.pdf (4.1 MB) Working_Together_to_Safeguard-Children.pdf (2.3 MB) Making Safeguarding Personal - Guide 2014.pdf (277.9 kB)     Course Tutor Your tutor is Ross Maynard. Ross is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants in the UK and has 30 years’ experience as a process improvement consultant specialising in finance processes. Ross is also a professional author of online training courses for accountants. Ross lives in Scotland with his wife, daughter and Cocker Spaniel