Training Industry Magazine - Winter 2014 - (Page 42)

IN PRACTICE Facing strong competition, a commoditized market and an unstable global economy, a Fortune 100 Company looked to change its global sales culture from a transactional, product-focused organization to more of a strategic, customer-focused organization. Here's how they did it: * Empowered a representative global team of leaders, sales, operations and customers to customize the processes, tools and competencies to ensure fit and buy-in. * Designed a practical approach to customer engagement that increased their success rate on key accounts and opportunities. * Focused their training and reinforcement efforts on discovering, articulating and validating what their customers value most. * Leveraged all customer-facing team members to achieve stronger levels of internal alignment, which resulted in more effective customer alignment. * Involved sales leaders as coaches in every aspect of deployment; before, during and after sales training. * Utilized technology to provide on-demand learning to equip and enable customer-facing teams to create customer value. solving with all the appropriate customer-facing personnel and equip them to do so. This allows the customer and supplier to create a forum in which both parties are able to: * Connect supplier and customer team members for optimal value creation. * Explore specific areas of potential mutual value creation to determine priorities, fit and best use of resources. * Develop customer-specific value propositions for best fit opportunities that both parties are committed to pursue. * Execute mutual action plans in pursuit of these best fit opportunities by applying the most appropriate resources. * Follow up to measure results and test the effectiveness of the collaboration, the planning and the execution. REINFORCED BY COACHING Another challenge with many sales training initiatives is that they are primarily event based, resulting in participants forgetting what they have learned after the training event. To add insult to injury, sales management typically is not actively involved in the training, reinforcement and measurement going forward. This creates a "flavor of the month" perspective among the training 42 participants and impacts the adoption and traction of the new processes and tools. Adoption and traction increases when management is proactively involved from a coaching perspective before, during and after training. Many organizations train their managers on how to coach; however, it is typically generic coaching on how to give feedback or how to be an active listener. This usually happens once or twice a year around performance reviews and focuses on past performance. In order to be most effective and sustain the desired behavioral changes, the sales training of the future must include the leadership team before, during and after training. Sales managers are most effective at coaching when they are proactively coaching to what's known as leading indicators; those competencies and best practices that, when executed, consistently and effectively lead to successful outcomes. The need for coaching and reinforcement is growing stronger in a multigenerational workforce where employees desire to be effectively coached and led. When sales leaders and managers are equipped to coach, they learn a set of proven field sales coaching skills to help them create value for their people that lead to winning more business and growing customer relationships. ENABLED BY TECHNOLOGY While technology has been used in sales training in the past, few have figured out how to avoid "the technology tail" wagging the "sales training dog." Many will use technology for technology's sake and neglect what's in it for the customer-facing team. Enabling technology can be anything from an Excel spreadsheet for territory and pipeline management to a learning management system (LMS) for e-learning to a CRM system for connecting effectively with social media.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Winter 2014

Tracking Trends
Table of Contents
Guest Editor: Meeting Today's Learning Consumers Where They Are
Facilitating Change
How Smart Leaders Squash Employee Entitlement
The Reskilling of Design
Responsive Design and Learning Solutions
Women, Leadership and Emotional Intelligence
Key Trends for 2014: Shifting to Business-Centric Learning
The Promise of Badges for Learning and Development
The Business Leader's Bottom Line: Aligning Learning with Organizational Needs
Raising the Bar: The Impact of Sales Training on Effective Customer Engagement
The Language of Measurement: When to Assess, Evalutate and Test
Casebook: Combined Insurance: Ensuring Efficient Sales Training via Mobile Learning
The Challenge of Workplace Re-entry After Training
The Learning Shift: From Event to Process
What's Online
Company News

Training Industry Magazine - Winter 2014