What We Do

We bring your brand promise to day-to-day communication by applying a set of highly effective communication skills and related competencies to your current and future needs, financial goals, business model, and company culture.

  • Coaching & Customer Relationship Training – What if your Leadership Coach could also empower you and your teams with the communication skills and infrastructure to help make goals and dreams a reality?
  • Restaurant & Hospitality Training – Results-driven restaurant and hospitality best practices that reduce costs and increase profitability.
  • Related Services – Benefit from a variety of skill sets in our network of creatives and technology professionals to complete the brand puzzle, including brand development, Social Media, video, and technology solutions.

Coaching & Customer Relationship Training

Our communication solutions are designed specifically for each client’s needs. That’s why Strauss Training, Inc. is known for crafting a positive communication infrastructure that is light-years beyond other archaic (and often manipulative) cookie-cutter approaches to sales and customer service. Key factors — like brand identity, value differentiation, industry-specific terms, company culture, employee retention strategy, revenue goals, and more — are considerations for everything we create, down to each word and phrase:

Core Communication Skills

Discover how these essential building blocks of all communication are used to design powerful solutions specific to your organization's needs and goals.

Build lasting customer relationships that yield long-term results. Watch your organization’s culture transform as these very same skills solidify interpersonal and interdepartmental relationships.

iPEC Energy Leadership™ Coaching

Your ICF Accredited iPEC Energy Leadership™ Coach will help you define and realize success as you choose how you will “show up” in every area of your personal and professional life.
Build the life of your dreams with a trained iPEC Energy Leadership Coach™ . Discover how you “show up” in every moment and decide how you will engage with life both professionally and personally.

Customer Service

Resolve issues while building outstanding customer relationships.
Problem resolution is just the beginning. Turn customer frustration into satisfaction while using “Deal from a Position of Strength” techniques to respectfully and ethically protect your organization’s financial interests.

Inside Sales

Maximize your inbound and outbound sales efforts.
Prospecting, Account Management, Customer Relationships, Closing Techniques, and more!

Sales Support

Where the customer and field rep are your #1 customers.
Build a nuclear-powered, inside sales support team as a resource for your sales and service field professionals.

Tech Support

More than just information exchange -- it's all about bringing relief.
Phone technical support has many challenges. Utilize highly effective communication and listening skills to help customers resolve technical issues and alleviate frustration.

Field Service

Enhance the customer relationship and create opportunities.
Discover untapped revenue and avoid customer service nightmares by empowering your field service staff to easily build lasting customer relationships.

Outside Sales

B2C or B2B. Experience the momentum of a relationship-based sales culture.
Equip your field sales team with a communication approach that molds to any situation. Sales processes, presentation skills, and closing techniques that yield results and referrals.

Management

Build rock-solid employee and interdepartmental relationships!
Management is a key ingredient in continuing the mission of healthy, company-wide communication. Realize greater overall success while saving on hidden costs directly related to disconnected leadership and employee turnover.

S.M.A.R.T. Goals

Simple, easy-to-use, and effective goal setting.

Traditional, motivation-based goal setting not working? S.M.A.R.T. Goals are the perfect wire frame to mold success at every level.

Scripting

The wire frame of sales and customer service communication.
Move beyond etched-in-stone “scripts” and empower your reps to talk “with” your customers instead of “at” them.

CRM & ERP

Are you getting the most out of your software platforms and data solutions?
Maximize the use of your CRM, ERP, and Knowledge Base solutions by leveraging our implementation experience and usage training.

Reporting & Metrics

Make informed sales and staffing decisions to ensure continued growth.
From sales numbers to call data to VOC feedback, review hard data to better focus staffing, training, and marketing initiatives.
Get in Touch

Questions?

Do you specialize in any vertical markets?

I understand you’re from Chicago, where will you travel to consult and train?

What would you say is the most valuable communication skill?

How long have you been training on all the skills listed here?

How are you different from other communication and sales trainers?

What do you mean when you say brand from the inside out?

How long is your typical consulting or training engagement?

Restaurant & Hospitality Training

Every moving part in a restaurant affects all the others. This is why our consulting engagements are always mindful of your unique culture and organizational structure. With expertise in the following areas, we’ll work with you to design solutions that fit your specific short-term and long-term goals.

Guest Service

Is your service as good as your food?
Hands-on training of all FOH staff to continually exceed guest expectations. Organizational skills, service standards and best practices, and the physicality of the professional service experience.

Communication

Clear, concise, and caring are the keys to happy guests and loyal employees.
Consistency in Social Media, Marketing, and Brand across all guest relations. Reservations, Menus, and POS across all employee relations.

Team Building

The difference between wanting to do something and having to do something.
Inspire and motivate individuals to be part of a successful team while weaving in goal setting, contests, and educational seminars.

Bar Service

Bring your bar service to the next level and give your guests something to talk about.
Consistent, knowledgeable, and personable bar service is a great way to build long-lasting guest relationships. Plus, ask about custom branded drinks and cocktails!

Seminars

Focused content built on a strong communication foundation.
Specialties include wine pairings, food knowledge, service standards, and focused training on specific guest relation skills.

Management

Great managers don't just manage - they lead.
Maximize the effectiveness of your management team to build organizational confidence. From powerful management techniques, leadership training, to forecasting, scheduling, and mentoring.

Staffing

Discover experienced and hidden talent to build a powerful team.
Effective training starts with a strong staff. Avoid the pitfalls of reactive hiring with a proactive interviewing and hiring process.

Financials

The truth about where your money goes... and how to keep it.
Effective forecasting for accurate budgets and efficient ordering. How to conduct accurate inventories. Cash handling procedures examined along General Ledgers and P&L statements.

Sensitivity Training

Healthy internal relationships translate to even better customer relationships.
The best way to avoid destructive personnel issues is to head them off before they can happen. Training on and follow through with all aspects of sensitivity training is crucial to maintaining a healthy work environment.

Safety Training

Adherence to Sanitation, OSHA, Fire Safety and other regulations.
Ensure the safety of your guests and staff, and pass inspections with flying colors.

Vendors & Facilities

Make sure your facility runs smoothly and top line sales make it to the bottom line.
Proactive vendor and purveyor communication ensures you receive the same high level of service you give your guests. Also discover cost savings you didn’t know were possible.

Startups

From concept to creation - set yourself up for success.

50% of startups fail within 3 years. Yours doesn’t have to. Let us help make your dream a lasting reality.

Get in Touch

Questions?

Does your training include hands on, live interaction with guests?

Are you able to directly help with staffing at all levels?

How much crossover is there with your other business training and branding services?

What jobs have you worked in a restaurant?

What’s involved with your wine seminars?

Do you offer secret shopper services? Do you provide one-on-one manager mentoring?

Related Services

Successful branding and marketing are only effective when supported by a powerful communication structure. This includes technology solutions, which are meant to streamline processes and to further enhance each customer’s brand experience.

To ensure maximum ROI for every client, we provide these related services, with communication training as the hub. From branding and design to TV commercials, professional writing, software implementation and more, we’re able to create a complete communications package for your organization.

Building brands from the inside out — with communication training at the core — is the true art of business creativity. We’re proud to have created branding solutions for organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 50 companies, and have served as Creative Director on co-branded projects for Disney, Motorola, the NFL, and NASCAR. This depth of experience helps inform communication training decisions, with or without branding as part of the project.

Whether you want to enhance the performance of an already-established brand or build a new brand identity from scratch, contact us to learn more.

We not only create brands, we also make them stand out by ensuring brand consistency across all media. With over 15 years of project management and creative direction experience, and a wealth of in-house and partner resources, we can help with a variety of creative projects:

  • Web
  • Logo Design
  • Product Branding
  • Marketing Collateral
  • Magazine and Newspaper Ads

All of these and more are available with in-house and partner resources.

If you’re looking to produce effective branding and direct response broadcast media, tap in to our creative direction experience and gain access to top design and production houses around Chicago. Following is one of our produced TV commercials which also includes the jingle we created used across all broadcast media:

The soft-spoken but hard-hitting twin of verbal communication is writing. This essential element of business and branding requires professional attention as much as any other communication vehicle. A well-turned phrase can be as powerful as a million-dollar ad campaign.

  • Industry Articles
  • Press Releases
  • User and Training Manuals
  • Brochures, Sell Sheets, and Websites
  • Blogs and New Media campaigns
  • White Papers
  • e-Books, Ghostwriting, and more!
With 20% of all websites built on this ever-evolving platform, WordPress has become a powerful business tool. What started as a simple blogging framework, now provides highly-flexible solutions for a variety of implementations including customer-facing, branded websites (like this one) and internal knowledge bases to keep your entire company on the same communication page.
Along with experience working with ERP implementation, CRM setup and training, and creating knowledge base solutions using WordPress, Strauss Training, Inc. has also built dynamic web solutions and .NET applications. The right technology — along with effective usage training — can solve nagging logistical and personnel problems, as well as issues you didn’t even know existed.