Business Issue
Historically, this global water treatment company’s growth was fueled by an aggressive acquisition strategy, resulting in international offices managing multiple brands and salesforces and sales leaders operating largely on their own.
Much work had been done previously around devising go-to-market strategies, creating value propositions, and understanding customer segmentation and coverage. This lead to the establishment of standard processes, tools, and approaches for positioning products, services, and solutions to customers’ needs and values.
Priorities for achieving sales excellence evolved to implementing a consistent global sales process framework and a value-based sales methodology to achieve organic growth.
Solution
To help build a structure for developing the sales organization, the water treatment company leveraged its eight-year relationship with Wilson Learning, which had provided expert-level executive and global leadership development.
Knowing Wilson Learning’s expertise in sales effectiveness, consulting capabilities, and customization services, the solution for strengthening sales and sales leadership performance began to take shape. Wilson Learning helped the company customize the sales process—grounded in a value-based selling approach—and aligned it with the customer buying process.
The sales curriculum included a customized version of Wilson Learning’s The Counselor Salesperson™, a two-day instructor-led workshop. Both sellers and sales leaders attended the training, with leaders attending an additional one-day workshop, Coaching the Counselor Salesperson™.
The Learning Advantage by Wilson Learning was also deployed for sellers and sales leaders as an extended performance system, ensuring sustainability of newly acquired skills and behaviors via sales leader engagement, reinforcement, and ongoing coaching.
Outcome
This solution resulted in two important outcomes.
First, sales professionals now create interest by:
- Identifying areas of potential value using quantified examples
- Using critical discovery skills of questioning and listening to identify needs and value levers
- Proposing and presenting recommended solutions that fit with customer needs, motives, and value levers
With ongoing coaching and support from engaged managers, new skills and tools are being used with success in the field.
The second outcome was Wilson Learning’s deep understanding of the strategic priorities set forth from the executive level down that went into developing the customized solution that addressed the company’s critical needs and closed performance gaps.
This training on an enterprise-wide sales process (suited to customer buying preferences) and a value-based sales approach, reinforced by sales leaders, was rolled out over four GBUs, using flexible delivery options and facilitators who adapted to language, cultural, and platform-specific strategies.