What do you do when revenues remain flat or decline slightly? What do you do when too large a proportion of your revenue comes from a small number of your clients? You have to expand your client base and gain new clients, and you have to widen your executive level contact within your existing clients. What’s more, you need a learning strategy that helps your sellers and sales leaders shift their thinking and approach in line with these goals.
That’s exactly what we did. We tracked our progress through four key milestones:
- Defining the business imperative. To start the project, we answered the question: What business objectives do we need to meet? For us, the driving factor was “expanding relationships outside existing buying centers (primarily IT) to new buyers.”
-
Identifying learners in the sales population. With the end in mind, we set off to design a program to meet this strategic challenge by clearly identifying our audience and the key learning outcomes. For this program, our audience was senior sellers and sales managers with the mission of “engaging more effectively at the CXO level.”
Advertisement -
Balancing design points to craft an effective program. Next, we focused on our critical design elements. We closely evaluated design decisions like using virtual training or traditional classroom. Another major decision was determining whether to source services and content internally or outsource the project to external providers.
- Measuring real business results and value. Like any project our measurement factors looked at participant satisfaction and whether specific skills covered in training transferred to the job. In the end, our program delivered more than 900 percent ROI to the business. You didn’t read that wrong; it is not a typo. We really achieved a 900 percent return on our investment.
If you want your sellers and sales leaders to give feedback like "I now have more credibility with my clients' CXOs” and “I am building better value propositions and improving the success ratio of them,“ develop a sales learning program that has staying power—and measurable results.
