Business Issue
Known for safety and operational excellence, this airline’s talented workforce is recognized as one of its greatest competitive advantages.
The airline determined its need to enhance the customer experience with the ultimate objective of winning market share and increasing revenue in an extremely competitive industry.
The company sought to increase efficacy and manage risk by understanding development gaps and addressing them with appropriate courses from a full sales and services curriculum.
Solution
To equip salespeople with the consultative selling skills needed to stay competitive, the airline turned to Wilson Learning, a learning services company with expertise in sales effectiveness.
Fully committed to expanding their training offerings, the airline worked with Wilson Learning to create a curriculum for fundamental sales, customer service, and sales leadership skills that could be implemented globally.
The sales curriculum included a customized version of Wilson Learning’s The Counselor Salesperson™, a two-day instructor-led workshop.
The Counselor Salesperson: Salespeople learn skills to create and maintain lasting professional sales relationships in competitive markets. Selling is introduced as a definable and manageable consultative process in which there is a win-win interaction between the buyer and the seller. Participants learn to identify the customer’s business needs and present solutions to meet those needs.
Post-session coaching, leadership support, and reinforcement activities helped ensure learning was transferred to the job.
Outcome
Because of this training, the company’s salespeople were able to establish a greater level of trust with customers faster, leading to stronger business relationships.
Both short-term and long-term customer satisfaction increased through consistent, win-win interactions.
Salespeople were able to identify and articulate customer business needs more accurately and completely using the consultative problem-solving approach.
Salespeople were also better equipped to handle objections, allowing them to focus on aligning their solution with the customer’s business need and ultimately gain more accepted proposals and closed deals.
There was a marked increase in revenue with the implementation of these curriculum offerings. Based on this success, the courses that were originally self-selected for development are now considered mandatory.
