When companies like Marriott, Dell, and GE want to take performance to another level, they all turn to one man – Tom Connellan. And with good reason. Whether it’s an hour-long keynote or a day-long interactive session, Tom’s unique combination of solid research and street-smart business sense will make his appearance a meeting highlight.   A former Program Director and Research Associate at the University of Michigan Business School, Tom brings depth and breadth to your meeting. As a company founder and former CEO, he knows first-hand what it takes to grow a business. Tom started a service company in the health care field and built it into a network of 1200 instructors serving 300 hospitals and most of the Fortune 500 firms. He’s worked in manufacturing and sales. Tom knows what it’s like to be on the firing line of business and audiences connect with this practical experience.   The author of nine books and numerous articles, Tom has been quoted in leading publications such as U.S. News and World Report and The New York Times. He’s been the Editorial Director of four management and personnel magazines, a first level supervisor, and a company president.   Tom can show you how to create Sustained Superior Performance, how to handle those difficult conversations that always seem to arise, and how to win the hearts and minds of your customers.

Everyone leaves Tom’s session with practical how-to’s they can put to work the next day. His fast-paced, entertaining, and informative presentations captivate participants from start to finish.

Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences   This presentation shows you why customers are tougher today and what you need to do about it right away. It’s tied in part to Tom’s Wall Street Journal Bestseller Inside the Magic Kingdom (which describes how Disney creates exceptional customer experiences and how you can do the same).   His basic premise about brands and customers is that “a brand does not and cannot exist separately from your customer’s experience.” As Tom puts it, “your customer?s experience is your brand!”   Participants see how creating an exceptional customer experience builds both a winning brand and a winning bottom line. They learn the five different levels of loyalty and what it takes to move customers from one to the next.   Tom takes you behind the scenes at companies that create world-class customer experiences. He combines that with the latest research to show you how to capture the hearts and minds of your customers. He and his partners have conducted research covering more than 110,000 customer transactions. This solid background assures that your participants will receive meaningful content they can use right away.   One important point Tom brings to your meeting from those 110,000 transactions is the critical employee satisfaction -» customer satisfaction -» profitability link.   He describes how a single internal factor directly drives customer loyalty and profitability in such compelling terms that engineering teams, entire IT departments, C level executives, sales teams, manufacturing managers, HR departments, and others regularly participate in this session.  Key points Tom covers include: Why, in the eyes of your customer, your competition isn’t who you might think it is and what to do about that. How to capitalize on the one internal factor that stands out above all others as the largest single predictor of customer loyalty. How to retain at-risk customers. How to find out the real reason a customer stopped buying from you.  Why customer satisfaction is a poor predictor of loyalty and what to do about that.

Alternate Titles:

Creating Exceptional Customer Experiences

Experiential Branding

Focusing on the Customer  

Turbulent Times Leadership   Based upon Tom’s New York Times Bestseller Bringing Out the Best in Others, this presentation shows your leadership team how to keep everyone fully engaged, highly motivated, and performing well in a challenging environment.   Because he combines his research into high performance with his experience as an entrepreneur and CEO, he delivers actionable ideas that can be put to use immediately.   Tom’s research on high performance over the last twenty years has covered astronauts, CEO’s, Rhodes Scholars, female world leaders, manufacturing operations, top students, top performing sales reps, military achievers, U.S. presidents, and others.  He found that through thick or thin, leaders of high performing teams consistently treat team members differently in 3 different skill areas, and Tom’s three-part message to leaders looking for high performance from their team is to: Believe in them.  Hold them accountable.  Provide a supportive environment.   His research into sales managers, for example, showed that the managers of high performing reps score 22% higher in their ability to practice those three skills than do the managers of low performers.

Most leaders use some degree of all three skills, but even in the best of times very few use all three in a manner that consistently gets the performance levels they want. The most common occurrence in normal times is to overdo accountability and underdo support – although sometimes the reverse is true. In turbulent times, this imbalance gets even more pronounced and performance slips rather than improves.   If you’re getting your leadership team together, put Tom on the agenda to show everyone how to boost performance within 24 hours by going full throttle on all three factors.  

Making Exceptional Things Happen in a Changing World   We live in an increasingly upside-down world. To quote the great sage Yogi Berra, “even the future ain’t what it used to be.” The scope, complexity, and rate of change is increasing in virtually every organization. Yet, individuals at all levels must keep focused on producing results – even in the face of greater instability.   This presentation is based upon Tom’s next book – The 1% Solution TM. It incorporates some of his research into Olympic Gold Medal Winners. Tom found that in the men’s downhill at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, for example, the difference between first place and fourth place was 1.08 seconds or .9%. In all Olympic events, the difference between a gold medal and no medal averages about 1%. Between 1st and 10th place, the average is about 2%.   Whether it’s sales reps, manufacturing directors, engineers, entrepreneurs, or others, the key to building sustainable profits in an upside down world lies not in trying to be 100% better than your competition; it lies in simply being 1% better in everything you do.   Best of all, by researching Olympic athletes, Tom’s uncovered a unique way business leaders in a high pressure situation can jump-start performance within 72 hours. Tom coined the term “Behavioral Leverage” to describe this process.   If you’re looking for ways to help your audience keep forward momentum strong in turbulent times, let go of the old and embrace the new, this presentation is a good choice for you.