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A national home builder needed to be sure his model home sales reps were taking prospects out into the community to show inventory homes and site lots. Some reps preferred to stay in the air conditioned model office, and merely give prospective home buyers a map or point them in the general direction - losing the opportunity to turn prospects into buyers.

The sales manager had a list of sales steps the reps should follow, so the reps knew what was expected of them. The builder told the reps they would be “mystery shopped” periodically, and all reps had signed an agreement to be shopped as part of their employment. The first mystery shops this builder tried included a written shoppers report turned in to the sales manager. The report included the shoppers opinion of how well the rep accomplished all of the steps in the sales process (including going out to show inventory homes and lot sites). The sales manager would then meet with the rep and go over the shoppers critique. This process resulted in some improvement but the reps frequently denied their actions from the mystery shopper reports. After several rounds of “it’s the reps word against the mystery shoppers word”, the sales manager decided to take a different approach. He hired a Tampa, Florida based performance improvement company (Professional Development Services, Inc.) to video/audio mystery shop his 25 sales reps. All of the reps were video/audio shopped and the sales manager discovered that 52% of his reps were not following the prescribed sales process. The sales manager coached each rep by showing the DVD recorded shop to the rep and asking the rep to give their own critique based on the video.

Several things happened as a result of the video mystery shopping process:
1) When the reps were told they would be video shopped, their performance improved immediately. This is known as the “Halo effect” in the mystery shopping performance improvement business.
2) The feedback sessions with the sales manager became much more specific and uncovered additional sales opportunities that had been missed previously.
3) After the first round of mystery video shops, reps followed the complete sales process 96% of the time (compared to 48% previously).
4) Sales reps admitted that the evaluation process was fair because it demonstrated actual performance compared to a shoppers, customers, or managers “opinion” of their performance.
5) This builder reports a 10% increase in sales closed within three months of initiating the video mystery shopping program.

Tips to consider if you are thinking about trying this process to accelerate sales performance:
1) Make sure your sales (and/or customer service reps) have a clearly defined process that they are required to follow with prospects and customers. This “checklist” will become an important part of the performance assessment session.
2) Don’t use the feedback videos as a negative reinforcement “club” to penalize reps.
3) Make sure your reps have signed an agreement (usually part of the employment contract) that allows them to be mystery shopped if you are in one of the 33 “dual consent” states.

4) Don’t try to create a false “Halo effect”. In other words, don’t tell reps they are going to be shopped when they aren’t.
5) Make sure the company you employ to conduct the shops are experts at covert video/audio performance surveillance.

Joe Jones (not an alias) is President of Professional Development Services, Inc., a Tampa, Florida based sales and service performance improvement company. Joe has been in the customer relations training and development business since 1985. He was the Vice President of Business Development for Kaset International (now Achieve Global), the top rated customer relations training company in the US. Joe was President of the American Society for Training & Development Suncoast chapter and President of the National Speakers Association, Central Florida chapter. He may be reached at 813-960-1876 or joejones@tampabay.rr.com, or www.pdswebsite.com.

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When doing an interview there need to be at least three people involved. The person being interviewed, you, the interviewer and someone to work the camcorder. It could be argued - I would so argue - that an extra person to handle the sound is a great benefit but this is a policy of perfection.

Interviewing for video is a skill that can be acquired with practice. The key to successful interviewing is research, research and yet more research.

Before you interview a subject you need to know as much as possible about the person you are interviewing.

And you need to read everything that anyone has ever written about the subject.

This is what the Internet is for. Typically it contains everything written in recent times.

The more information you can get, the more research you do, the smoother the interview will go.

Having said that it is vital that you, the interviewer, both asks questions and knows when to shut up.

The problem is that often you will find yourself knowing more about a subject than the person you are interviewing, and the temptation then is to show off your knowledge.

This is fatal.

The viewer is not interested in your views. It is the person being interviewed - the interviewee - who should be the center of attention. And before you ask, yes, this is a major problem for me. I cannot keep my big mouth shut.

Be prepared for interviews that go smoothly and those that get a bit ragged. Three examples.

I had an hour interview with Bill Gates in Sydney for Australian television. My questions were well prepared. He would listen to the question, stay quiet for a moment and then give a cogent, grammatical answer. Amazing. As an interview it went like a dream.
On the other hand, I got one very wrong. The interview with the late Tony Hancock, perhaps the greatest British comedian of his day, took place in the Sebel Town House in Sydney. It started as a shambles for I had not done enough homework. It evened out after a while and in the end worked reasonably well. As it happens it was the last interview given by Tony Hancock.

Then I did a series of interviews with members of my family. I stayed out of shot and just let them ramble on what they thought about their siblings. It was electrifying stuff. If you were a member of that family.

Write all of your questions down and create supplementary questions in case an answer, a good answer, is not forthcoming.
Avoid questions that invite the single word answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

If you ask ‘Are you in favor of premarital sex?’ you will probably get a single word reply, which is not the idea at all.

Phrase your questions so that they lead the person being interviewed into expanding their views. ‘Your book suggests that you are against premarital intercourse. What are your views on this?’ is much more likely to elicit a full and frank comment than the first question.

To avoid a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer use the tried and true journalist technique of asking who, what, why, how and when questions.
None of these can be answered with a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Before the interview starts, you, the interviewer, must meet the subject and establish some sort of rapport. There are interviewers, a few, who can go in cold and get a good result. But they are few and far between.

The preliminary chat is, as it were, part of your research.
With it you will establish the ability of the person being interviewed to talk, to express themselves, to answer questions. It is possible that this preliminary talk will end in you modifying some of your questions.

In your preliminary chat avoid asking the specific questions you will be asking in the interview.

Instead, indicate general areas of interest. If you ask the specific questions the filmed interview will give an impression that it has been rehearsed.

Before you start your interview have your key questions laid out and ready. You need a certain amount of flexibility but most of the time you will find that your first and logical thoughts or question order is much better than one you compile while winging it.

There are two main way of handling an interview.

The first is where the question is not heard and the questioner not seen. Instead, you get answers that are obviously directed at someone who is out of shot.

A series of answers like this can be edited together from either one person or several, to provide the effect of a continuous interview.

In this sort of interview you ask the question and then you keep your big mouth shut. If some sort of reaction is needed nod or shake your head vigorously or smile encouragement. If you speak you will have to be edited out afterwards. Which is not always easy.

This technique can be seen being used to magnificent effect in the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ which contains a series of such interviews with married couples describing their lives together. Magic.

The other type of interview is where you are both on screen in the manner of a normal conversation. This sort of interview can easily be covered with one camera.

Shoot the interviewee’s answers first and then shoot the interviewer from where the interviewee has been sitting, asking exactly the same questions. At the end you do a series of ‘noddies’ that can be used for cutaways.

The key to making such an interview work is to get the person relaxed. Try to film them in a familiar surrounding so that they do not feel threatened. Keep the camera work and the lighting as unobtrusive as possible.

The first question should be a sound level check and should be totally innocuous.

Start the interview very gently in a chat mode and always move from soft to hard questions imperceptibly.
Do not start like gangbusters or the interviewee will clam up or, in the worst case, walk off. It happens.

At the end of the interview I always ask ‘Is there some question you would like me to have asked that I have missed out on?’

This allows the subject to expand on a point or deal with an area they feel has been skipped. It is quite remarkable how often you will get an excellent and usable response after that last question.

Start off with a long shot of the person being interviewed facing the interviewer. The interviewer’s back appears, which gives a three-dimensional aspect to the shot and gets the scene in context for the viewer. Change the shot sizes in rhythm with the questions. New question, new framing.

Another form of interviewing on video is vox pop - from vox populi, Latin for the voice of the people - are quick interviews with people in the street to demonstrate public opinion on a subject.

What you want to end up with is a series of statements that can be cut rapidly together and, in the end, give a clear indication of the current attitude on a subject.

To make the interview more interesting change the shot size as a new question is asked. That is, switch off, zoom in from, say, mid shot to close-up, and then resume filming again.

Use different backgrounds and different eyelines.

Work out how many interviews you want and then shoot to that number with perhaps a 50 per cent safety margin. Do not go on shooting after that point. You could be getting useful footage for another scene rather than wasting your time. In vox pop moderation is the key.

Note carefully that subjects can move backwards and forwards when making a point and may even wave arms around in the air and you need to be prepared for this so they are always in shot. That the camera does not cut off parts of their bodies. Armless interviewees may be harmless interviewees but that is not the point of the excercise.

Gareth Powell has done many interviews for newspapers, magazines and television. He writes about making videos on his site, Digital images, http://www.pixelates.com

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Preparing to pass the CCNA exam and earn this important Cisco certification? Route summarization is just one of the many skills you’ll have to master in order to earn your CCNA. Whether it’s RIP version 2, OSPF, or EIGRP, the CCNA exam will demand that you can flawlessly configure route summarization.

Route summarization isn’t just important for the CCNA exam. It’s a valuable skill to have in the real world as well. Correctly summarizing routes can lead to smaller routing tables that are still able to route packets accurately - what I like to call “concise and complete” routing tables.

The first skill you’ve got to have in order to work with route summarization is binary math; more specifically, you must be able to take multiple routes and come up with both a summary route and mask to advertise to downstream routers. Given the networks 100.16.0.0 /16, 100.17.0.0 /16, 100.18.0.0 /16, and 100.19.0.0 /16, could you quickly come up with both the summary address and mask? All you need to do is break the four network numbers down into binary strings. We know the last two octets will all convert to the binary string 00000000, so in this article we’ll only illustrate how to convert the first and second octet from decimal to binary.

100 16 = 01100100 00010000

100 17 = 01100100 00010001

100 18 = 01100100 00010010

100 19 = 01100100 00010011

To come up with the summary route, just work from left to right and draw a line where the four networks no longer have a bit in common. For these four networks, that point comes between the 14th and 15th bits. This leaves us with this string: 01100100 000100xx. All you need to do is convert that string back to decimal, which gives us 100 for the first octet and 16 for the second. (The two x values are bits on the right side of the line, which aren’t used in calculating the summary route.) Since we know that zero is the value for the last two octets, the resulting summary network number is 100.16.0.0.

But we’re not done! We now have to come up with the summary mask to advertise along with the summary route. To arrive at the summary route, write out a mask in binary with a “1″ for every bit to the left of the line we drew previously, and a “0″ for every bit to the right. That gives us the following string:

11111111 11111100 00000000 00000000

Converting that to dotted decimal, we arrive at the summary mask 255.252.0.0. The correct summary network and mask to advertise are 100.16.0.0 252.0.0.0.

For the CCNA exam, emphasis is put on knowing how to advertise these summary routes in RIPv2 and EIGRP. For both of these protocols, route summarization happens at the interface level - it’s not configured under the protocol. On the interface that should advertise the summary route, use the command “ip summary-address”. Here are examples of how the above summary route would be configured on ethernet0 in both RIPv2 and EIGRP.

R1(config-if)#ip summary-address rip 100.16.0.0 255.252.0.0

R1(config-if)#ip summary-address eigrp 100 100.16.0.0 255.252.0.0

The main difference between the two is that the EIGRP command must specify the AS number - that’s what the “100″ is in the middle of the EIGRP command. Since RIPv2 does not use AS numbers, there’s no additional value needed in the configuration.

For OSPF, the commands differ. If you’re configuring inter-area route summarization, use the “area range” command; if you are summarizing routes that are being redistributed into OSPF, use the summary-address command under the OSPF routing process on the ASBR. Neither of these are interface-level commands.

I speak from experience when I tell you that practice makes perfect on the CCNA exam, especially with binary and summarization questions. The great thing about these questions is that there are no grey areas with these questions - you either know how to do it or you don’t. And with practice and an eye for detail, you can master these skills, pass the exam, and become a CCNA. Here’s to your success!

Chris Bryant, CCIE #12933, is the owner of The Bryant Advantage, home of free CCNA and CCNP tutorials, The Ultimate CCNA Study Package, and Ultimate CCNP Study Packages.

For a FREE copy of his latest e-books, “How To Pass The CCNA” and “How To Pass The CCNP”, visit the website and download your free copies. You can also get FREE CCNA and CCNP exam questions every day! Pass the CCNA exam with The Bryant Advantage!

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