``Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.`` - Benjamin Franklin
In an increasingly competitive world, are your salespeople sharpening their skills to maintain their advantage? With challenging quotas to meet and commissions to be earned, taking time out for training is often not on their to-do list. Discover how Flint has met this challenge by designing and developing customized sales training programs that are composed of relevant, interactive and engaging eLearning scenarios.
Customized Sales Training Case Study
Executive Summary:
Having completed a Sales Foundation course, employees of a leading Canadian bank needed practical training to maximize the retention and application of the concepts taught. The result was a program of scenarios that were custom developed for their business. The scenarios put sales professionals into realistic situations where they were challenged to make decisions. Feedback on where and how they could improve was then provided.
The Sales Training Program:
The first step was to review all 12 modules of the Bank’s Sales Foundation course and pinpoint the key learning objectives. Flint was then able to focus the learning content on the key skills to be assessed and reinforced. The review revealed the following 5 skills in need of focus:
- Capturing critical customer clues
- Understanding before recommending
- Uncovering both stated and unstated needs
- Providing advice, not just choice
- Asking for the business
The next step was to engage the Bank’s subject matter experts to map out realistic customer scenarios that would enable learners to practice and apply these skills. The process of building these scenarios involved:
- Identifying realistic situations
- Identifying the behaviours that learners needed to start or stop doing throughout the scenario
- Developing a happy path that results when these behaviours are practiced throughout the scenario
- Identifying key junctions where a learner could divert from the happy path
- Identifying realistic consequences for diverting and enabling the learner to experience these consequences
- Assigning points to each decision point throughout the scenario
This information was uncovered in a whiteboarding session. Following this session, Flint provided flow charts of each scenario with the potential paths and scoring, which were fine-tuned and approved in collaboration with the client. The scenarios were then built using responsive mobile design to enable a device-agnostic learning experience the learner could take anywhere.
The result was three, ten-minute multi-path scenarios that tested a learner’s ability to carefully listen and uncover visual and verbal clues to the customer’s needs, recommend a solution, ask for the business, and finally, respond to any objections.
Results
With most banking now being done online, there are fewer opportunities to increase revenue per customer through in-person visits to a branch. The scenarios motivated the learners to maximize those encounters by successfully engaging their customers and using the Bank’s consultative sales process. This enabled them to close a sale or secure follow-up appointments.
At the end of the project, Flint Learning Solutions’ scenarios scored the highest overall score and the highest score in knowledge transfer amongst all vendors involved in the project.