Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 46)

case study Whirlpool Corp.: Learning Grows with the Business Brian Summerfield Last year, Whirlpool Corp., the largest appliance provider in the United States, acquired Maytag, the third-largest, for $1.79 billion, making a powerhouse in this sector even stronger. The combined institutions account for nearly three quarters of the washer-dryer market. The enlarged enterprise has annual sales of more than $18 billion, almost 75,000 employees and more than 70 manufacturing and technology research centers around the world. Much of the learning has been moved to a virtual format to reduce expenditures incurred from travel to live educational events. Getting thousands of incoming personnel up to speed on their new employer’s products, processes and values can really test the limits of the learning function. Whirlpool has been especially challenged with getting sales associates onboard. Its associates, who are dispersed across North America and much of the rest of the world, must learn new product lines and brands inside out. To make it even more challenging, most of Whirlpool’s sales associates don’t actually work for the company — the majority of the approximately 3,500 salespeople who participate in Whirlpool’s learning programs work for large retailers that range from Sears to Best Buy to Lowe’s. The person responsible for those programs is David Provost, director of sales development. “‘Sales development’ is a fairly broad definition for training and education of the sales force,” Provost said. “We just purchased Maytag, and we integrated the two selling organizations. I was very involved with the new organizational structure and the development of new roles and competencies within our sales organization. “The integration of Maytag into an established industry leader like Whirlpool really has been a challenge from a complexity standpoint. We’ve been very encouraged by the fact that some wonderful people and processes came over from Maytag, but it’s a different mindset — we’ve had to get the organizations moving in the same direction and get the systems aligned. Things as simple as order processing have been challenging.” Although the expectation was that Maytag would simply adopt all of Whirlpool’s sales processes lock, stock and barrel and leave behind its old way of doing things before the actual acquisition, Provost said Maytag had some good processes that it chose to bring into Whirlpool. “Their commitment to really communicating the benefits of the Maytag brand on the sales floor is an area where we’ve learned from them,” he explained. “Their management of sell-through data for a better understanding of per-store performance is another thing we’ve looked at trying to incorporate at Whirlpool.” Additionally, salespeople for each organization had to learn about the other’s appliances. August 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 46 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - August 2007

Chief Learning Officer - August 2007

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.