Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 59)

BUSINESS IMPACT AWARD • GOLD • DIVISION 2 Fred DePerez Senior Sales and Product Training Manager, Chrysler The American auto industry has been struggling for some time, battling against increasing pressures from global competitors. And with the current economic situation worsening, things are likely to get worse. Chrysler’s former Senior Sales and Product Training Manager Fred DePerez, who has since moved on to another position in the company, thought training might help the company move past the economic crunch and increase sales consultants performance. There was only one problem: Sales consultants aren’t Chrysler employees. They work for more than 3,300 independent dealerships. Therefore, there’s no way to mandate training. And that was only the ﬁrst challenge. “The second challenge is, we went into skills training, and for a very, very long time, that’s always been the job for the dealership,” DePerez said. “The manufacturers do product training on our products and skills training for their employees. That’s been the mold for a long, long time, but it wasn’t working. “You don’t get consistency across dealerships in terms of the skills they were giving their sales consultants. It was in our interests to do something to break the mold and assist these independent franchises, our dealerships, to create some value in the learning proposition.” The objective was to improve sales performance in two stages: applied selling time (“What am I doing when I’m with a customer?”) and unapplied selling time (“What am I doing when I’m not with a customer?”). But DePerez said the environment made it tough to gain funding for the initiative. “It’s very, very tough to sell cars right now,” he explained. “There’s a lot of economic pressures on dealers and consumers. In that type of environment, it’s very difﬁcult to sell the company and the dealerships on change.” But the numbers didn’t lie. Over two years, the Chrysler Academy put together a blended sales consultant curriculum to teach everything from key interpersonal skills and new product information to more advanced skills such as prospecting and negotiating. Then DePerez commissioned a statistically based experiment with roughly 33,800 sales consultants. Some 8,500 sales consultants were fully trained, 11,600 were partially trained and 13,700 untrained sales consultants served as a control group. “We looked at those three metrics: customer satisfaction, turnover and sales volume,” DePerez said. “Everyone that got trained blew away that metric versus those that didn’t get trained.” Trained consultants sold 35 more units per year, but DePerez said the underlying metrics were perhaps more important. “Sometimes basic and more traditional metrics are not telling you the whole story. Almost 40 percent of our sales consultants had unacceptable monthly sales volumes. The reason was there were so many more untrained ones than were trained ones,” he explained. “From a retail perspective, it’s nice to know the training works and that a trained consultant can sell more and satisfy customers better. The downside is most stores didn’t have enough trained sales consultants. That was the last challenge that we faced.” During the experiment period, the Chrysler Academy performed a gap analysis, talking to sales consultants with superior performance to determine what they did on a daily basis to satisfy customers. A performance map followed that outlined the behaviors top performers executed to get the desired result. “At the very highest level we tried to prove that training was not an expense; it was an investment,” DePerez said. “We are obviously very happy with the results because it gave us a way to come back to customers. “In the Chrysler Academy, our customers are our dealers, our sales consultants and sales managers, service advisers — all the people a retail customer meets when he or she enters a dealership. Our sole purpose for existing is to make sure they do the best job possible, not only to satisfy our retail customers but to ensure the proﬁtability of our dealerships. “It’s about proﬁtability; it’s about the business. And satisfying customers is great business. That’s our role: teaching people how to do that. We proved that skills’ training does work.” – Kellye Whitney 59

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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.