Business Issue
A global publisher of scholarly works prides itself on its learning culture, placing a high value on training for their salespeople and sales leaders in prospecting and selling skills, sales coaching skills, and differentiating themselves from the competition. Due to an increase in the number of players in a competitive market and a fundamental shift in the way their customers made their buying decisions, their legacy sales training programs had lost their effectiveness and used an approach that was too linear and prescriptive. The sales organization needed a less cumbersome, more consultative sales approach with a problem-solving mindset to succeed in the ever-evolving markets they served.
Solution
The company embraced Wilson Learning’s The Counselor Salesperson™ program, with its problem-solving approach and simple but profound concepts for relating to customers, discovering their needs, advocating a comprehensive solution to advance their business and add value, and supporting the customer after the sale. They immediately started certifying their internal facilitators to deliver the training to new and less tenured salespeople.
The Vice President of Sales was sensitive to the fact that many of their more tenured salespeople had been trained in the legacy approach and wouldn’t need to be fully retrained. The solution was providing an online, interactive e-The Counselor Salesperson™ mini-mods microburst offering. This served to transition the more tenured salespeople in the consultative approach as they learned a shared sales language and saw the application of building trusting relationships and a problem-solving mindset.
After attending The Counselor Salesperson, sales leaders also experienced Coaching the Counselor Salesperson™ to engage and equip them to coach, reinforce, and sustain the new selling skills, behaviors, and tools.
Two-hour reinforcement classes, co-taught by a learning and development professional and a sales leader, reinforce and integrate new skills and share best practices and successes.
Outcome
More than 100 salespeople and sales leaders have been trained to date, and new groups have attended virtual workshops to meet social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The following key criteria set Wilson Learning apart and appealed to this company, even in a highly competitive situation that would replace their current training provider:
- Salespeople gain a problem-solving mindset and exemplify a consultative approach.
- The Counselor Salesperson’s selling methodology appealed to the company, in particular the critical skills of relating, differentiating, and adding value.
- With their salespeople often calling on professors on college campuses, it is imperative for salespeople to demonstrate the consultative approach during their brief interactions.
- The Wilson Learning Advantage provides a comprehensive approach, utilizing online reinforcement, access to an online learning portal, a coaching playbook, and ongoing account support to reinforce learning and transfer it to the job.
- Wilson Learning offers an authentic learning partnership that drives performance change and brings about undeniable results.