USING A COMMON APPROACH TO GROW SALES

Success Story

Wilson Learning works with North America’s largest environmental services company. Growing quickly by acquisition, the organization faces challenges as they gain new sales forces and expand their customer base. One of the greatest is establishing a common language and process that works to grow and retain their customer base in a quickly changing environment.

BUSINESS ISSUE

Traditionally the sales force focused on technical training. While this was essential, their Specialists were bidding projects without any formal or common sales (or service) methodology. This hindered their ability to gain and share critical information across the enterprise.

To succeed and thrive everyone needed to share a common, effective approach to sales and service. If not, each acquisition added more complexity than value when projects involved more than one business unit.

Competitors also were flooding the organization's marketplace, with predictable results: falling prices and increasing difficulty in differentiating.

Changing the way the organization went to market through its sales force was an urgent priority. The organization contacted a Wilson Learning business partner to help design and implement an integrated human performance improvement solution that would build a consultative sales culture.

The organization needed to deal with changing internal and external environments of their whole sales force: reps, managers, and account teams. Counselor Salesperson (CSP) was recommended for the entire sales force. This included a one-day overview for the executive team, and Managing Sales Performance (MSP) for all managers to coach and reinforce the new approach. An executive overview launched the project and a CSP pilot for District Managers confirmed and extended the desired outcomes for this initiative:

• The whole sales organization needed to use a consultative approach
• Everyone needed to become more proactive by anticipating questions and preparing better for sales meetings with internal and external customers
• They needed to listen better and share critical information before making any recommendations
• The sales force needed an effective common way to sell on value rather than price
• The strategy was to move from transactional, single-service sales toward multi-product, multi-service deals with better communication and coordination throughout the organization.

SOLUTION

Clearly, just training would not meet these needs. The organization implemented CSP to build a consultative sales culture with a focus on sustaining the new approach from the start.

The Corporate Sales Trainer and Director of Sales Training and Development were certified on the programs and aggressively implemented a comprehensive approach. Beyond training, they used call planning tools, a web-based development planning toolset, and sales manager tools for reinforcement or ridealongs.

Within the training, reps each brought several real cases (sales opportunities) in progress. Their managers and facilitators helped them plan how to advance these during and after training.

OUTCOME

The approach has been a success for the organization. They have established a common language and sales process. They continue to support that by training all new sales reps within their first six months. The Director of Sales Training and Development said, “Training our sales force to use the counselor approach is a critical success factor for the company’s growth in the future.”

Following up on those same cases that reps brought to training, the Director found these sales results that the CSP approach helped win:

• Eastern Region    $2,000,000
• Central Region     $1,000,000
• Midwest Region    $1,200,000

The integrated training and coaching led to $4.2M in major account sales as a demonstration of its effectiveness. The Corporate Sales Trainer reports that “Many service and operations people recognize the impact the Counselor approach makes, and they want to be part of it.”

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