Guest Post by Louisa Garcia Moreno

Employees today spend most of their lives in the workplace and when it’s not designed with their well-being in mind it can be a stressful and draining experience and could potentially harm their performance.

Safeguarding the mental, physical, emotional and financial health of employees in the workplace is the goal of corporate wellness. The effects that stress and poor health can have over performance levels and business success should not be underestimated. When lack of wellness inadvertently becomes part of a company’s culture it can have serious consequences for a business — what begins as employees’ poor performance may eventually translate into poor performance at a corporate level.

According to findcourses.co.uk’s 2019 L&D Report, the linking factor between well-being and business success is employee engagement, which in turn influences performance and productivity. Highly engaged employees typically...

As a company with education and professional development rooted in our mission, we spent a good amount of time searching for the right LMS (Learning Management System).  While we loved using Wordpress for our website, finding an LMS plugin with a smooth integration was a challenge. 

Several clients and partners talked about Teachable, Udemy, and Thinkific. All of those platforms are great for certain people and companies. For us, we found them limiting. All of those platforms have a big database of customers who are often categorized as "casual learners" or inactive. Those are not the people who get value from deep-dive training that requires logical thinking and some elbow grease to get the work done right.  

For Beckmann Collaborative, Kajabi had the key elements we needed to cohesively work together. That includes a functioning website, LMS, ecommerce, triggered emails, and other marketing tools. Not only do they have all of...

Beckmann Collaborative is a business training and marketing consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. We serve clients throughout the United States of America. Our mission is to transform teams from disorganized, fractured marketing efforts into those with a cohesive collaboration with better results.

We co-create innovative solutions with our clients around their marketing, sales, and operations. Together, we solve problems and create structures that allow each business to grow and evolve.

Our Values

Wisdom, Integrity, Collaboration, and Freedom

Wisdom: The thoughtful application of the knowledge gained is a reflection of your business acumen and grace. Beyond consulting, we educate clients and support them in applying new ideas and information to better their company. 

Integrity: The act of being reliable and honest in all parts of life reflects a deep trust. From the first meeting to the day a project is complete, we always share the truth about...

Guest Post by Don Matejko

Strong presentation skills are important for any sales professional, especially when the products or services being sold are complicated, expensive and/or unfamiliar to the prospect. Some salespeople are naturally gifted presenters, but most acquire their skills through experience and training. If you are responsible for training in this area, here are important tips to bring your salespeople along quickly in the art of sales presentation.

1. Establish a training knowledge base

Effective presentations require the presenter to be credible and authentic. No amount of pre-packaged text and dazzling imagery can cover up a presenter who doesn’t really know what he or she is talking about. In contrast, a presenter who exudes confidence and understanding can effectively turn prospects into customers even if the presentation itself is flawed. With this in mind, salespeople should have a very strong understanding of products, services, their company,...

Earlier this year, I was invited to become an instructor with General Assembly. A few times each month, I would go to their offices in downtown Austin to lead classes such as Intro to Digital Marketing and Intro to Content Strategy. The experience has been more enriching than I originally anticipated. Yes, I’m getting the opportunity to share what I’ve learned by trying and failing or succeeding to others. Hooray for knowledge transfer! Along the way, I learned some valuable lessons and so I perked up when they asked if I wanted to teach even more.

This month I’m leading a 10-week part-time course two nights per week. In preparation for teaching this course, General Assembly (GA) has a thorough onboarding procedure. I call it Training the Trainer. Stepping outside of the usual approach and getting new ideas from GA was incredibly helpful. 

Important Aside for Context:

I’ve been training my clients and their teams over the past 4...

Beckmann Collaborative is now an Authorized Zoho Partner!

What is Zoho?  It's is business management software that is cloud-based and can be fully integrated into every nook and cranny of a business. If you're interested, you can read their story and more about Zoho here. 

What does being a Zoho authorized partner mean? It means that we have worked with the many different Zoho applications long enough to officially help other small businesses to use it. 

At Beckmann Collaborative, we love marketing operations and improving processes. It's how we found Zoho. After using it within our own business for several months, we started to see how it could make our client's workflows much smoother and improve their productivity. So we've been helping several clients to implement it... so far it's going great.

The best "bang" for your buck, in our opinion, is Zoho One. This is your master-key to access all of the Zoho products. The reason you would want...

Why Would You Invest in Professional Development Training?

To attract and retain the best team of employees, professional development training must be more than a fringe benefit. Both salaried and hourly employees are seeking to work for the businesses who invest in their team. It is a prerequisite for attracting those top-performers.

Make employee training an ongoing process built into your business growth strategy. As new employees become acclimated to working in your company, they continue developing their skills and grow into larger roles. There are many reasons to provide professional development opportunities to employees that directly benefit your medium or small business.

If You Want the Best Employees, Provide Professional Development 

Expectations of entry-level employees have increased significantly over the past 10-15 years. Employers large and small have published job postings for entry-level positions, but requiring candidates to have 2-3 years...

For those of you who know me well, you might easily guess that I’m a big advocate of collaboration in business. Built into Beckmann Collaborative is the understanding that partnerships make us all stronger. When I share resources with my strategic partners, it allows us to improve the quality of each project, increase leads, expand brand awareness, and have a business confidant. These partners are purpose-driven and share some of my values.

What Does Collaboration Mean?

Simply put, collaboration is the act of engaging with someone to cooperatively create something. This definition is broad enough for one to understand, but how collaboration shows up in the workplace can often be unclear. This is especially difficult if you are a business owner and have been trained to focus on competition.

When businesses come together with a common purpose to serve a shared mission or customer, we all become stronger. Collaboration means that we find ways to create a bigger impact...

Since today is my birthday (Candice Beckmann), I wanted to share some personal insights from my experiences of growing up with incredible mentoring programs for developing my professional skills.

And I’d like to also express my gratitude for those individuals and employers who saw the importance of investing in me and others.

Mentors Make a Huge Difference

Mentoring programs help to build skills, not only in daily work duties, but also in the less tangible areas such as leadership, teamwork, confidence, and self-awareness. A great mentor provides priceless advice and guidance, which an employee or mentee will take on throughout her career. Thank you to those who have taken the time and patience to coach and support me over the years.

My life and the lives of those I work with are better because of the opportunities I had to learn and grow with past companies through training and mentoring programs. So I pay it forward as often as possible. I love being in a mentoring...