Business Issue
Over 10 years ago, helping clients shift from traditional to virtual work environments was an exciting opportunity for enterprise software providers. However, while clients had interest in trending to remote work, interest alone did not equate to “sales.”
The company questioned its sales approach as too product-focused and failed to show how its products and services provided the benefits their clients valued.
Their current, highly capable salesforce consisted of seasoned software and IT sales professionals from a variety of backgrounds and sales disciplines. This lack of sales team cohesion resulted in confusion for the client from a hodgepodge of sales philosophies, skills, and practices, making performance measurement and coaching difficult.
Solution
Regardless of prior selling styles, habits, and processes, all salespeople would be expected to sell from one sales strategy, learn and use a common sales language, and follow a sales process.
Sales leadership believed consistency would promote more efficacy and effectiveness in sales skills and behaviors, establish and encourage use of best practices, and gain a clear line of sight for realistic performance measurement.
Aware of Wilson Learning’s reputation for excellence in sales effectiveness, the company engaged Wilson Learning to design, develop, and implement this change.
Wilson Learning’s consulting services were leveraged to conduct thorough research of the company, its markets, and its go-to-market practices.
That work informed our instructional designers in developing a Learning Journey framework for embedding The Counselor Salesperson™ skills in onboarding newly hired salespeople.
- Within the first 30 days, new hires receive 5 days of training on the Counselor Approach and the skills of Relating and Discovering.
- During the next 3 months, participants “try on” their Relating and Discovering skills and receive feedback and reinforcement from their sales leaders.
- After that period, Advocating and Supporting skills are then learned in a follow-up 5-day workshop.
The Counselor Salesperson™ tools, like Discovery Agreements, were integrated into the CRM system to provide visibility of sales activity to sales managers, allowing them to monitor and drive salespeople to conduct comprehensive and purposeful discovery with their customers.
The sales leaders also received access to the Coaching Playbook that provides turnkey actions to help them improve their salespeople’s performance and reinforce consistency in using selling skills and behaviors.
Negotiating to Yes™ was also offered as an elective for teams whose sales leaders believed could benefit from increasing their influencing and negotiating skills.
Outcome
Using a consistent counselor process, coupled with sales leader coaching and an integrated CRM, the company saw a 30% uptick in win rate and a 39% higher average deal size for opportunities presented with Discovery Agreements that uncovered customers’ true business needs, in addition to technical needs.
This Learning Journey started over 10 years ago with 300 new hires trained each year. Wilson Learning continues to evolve our strategic learning partnership, adapting and flexing learning solutions and delivery methods to meet new challenges and changing demands.
Today, as remote work has gone mainstream, training is now being delivered virtually, keeping new hires engaged and on board.