Sales Team vs. Legal Department

A specialized legal organization of a client company was dedicated to supporting the large sales team. Unfortunately, it had gained the reputation of taking too long to review and execute contracts. Sales leadership  believed the attorneys didn’t have the knowledge needed to support the sales team, and were the root cause of missed sales forecasts. Under quota pressure and eager to get their deals through in a timely manner, salespeople were cutting corners making contract revisions on their own. Concerned about potentially compromising the company with such practices, sales leadership reached out to us to design training for the legal team.  

​Using Action Mapping, we uncovered that many contracts sent to legal had pre-approved language and terms, and could usually be executed by a sales manager. In short, the salespeople were unable to discern what required legal approval or not and unnecessarily clogged up the legal pipeline. ​What initially appeared to be a “training opportunity” for the legal team turned out instead to be the need for a series of real-life practice activities for the salespeople.

​Outcomes realized:

• The legal team was spared unnecessary training.​
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• Time and money for training development was invested in another business impacting activity
  
  
• Salespeople were easily able to consume 10-minute practice activities 2 or 3 times a week for one month leading to easily recognizing which contracts had to go to legal. 
  
  
• The legal backlog cleared within 3 months, eliminating the delay in closing business
  
  
• Increased accuracy of sales forecasting 
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• Bookings were converted to revenue earlier in the sales year. 

Telco Talent Retention

A small telecom company had difficulty attracting and retaining talent.  Engaged for an Action Mapping assessment, we validated that their recruiting was sound and that they were hiring the right people. Digging deeper, we asked the recruiters to walk us through the entire life-cycle of the hire from the recruiting phase to when (and if) they departed the company. We learned about the on-boarding program and found that it commenced with a 3-day face-face program largely comprised of a parade of executives and department leads sharing information about the company and its initiatives. It was very engaging, and the new hires were excited about having joined such a transparent and invested organization! The face-face was followed by self-paced training in systems, tools and products. 

​Outcomes realized:

• Retention increased
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• Recruiters could point to empirical evidence of early new hire success
  
  
• Time to productivity decreased
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• The on-boarding program became a recruiting differentiator 

While the new hires were usually on a high leaving their introduction to the organization, they often grew weary of the platitudes of “just take the training, you’ll be successful”.  While the self-paced training was animated and comprised of bite-sized videos, it was essentially the traditional information dump followed by knowledge checks. As soon as the new hire passed all the knowledge checks they were “ready” to do the job for which they were hired.  Unfortunately, they each had a head-full of information, but no context; they did not really know how to apply it to their jobs. 

Using the findings of Action Mapping, we were able to recast the on-boarding program creating real-life scenarios that replicated the action and decisions that each new hire would take in their respective job.  Moreover, these activities were conducted live and interspersed with executive/department head presentations; the basis for context and feedback about the decisions and actions the new hires took working through the scenarios. ​

Sales Organization vs. Pricing Organization

Salespeople at another client company were routinely missing their monthly forecast and often focused blame on the pricing organization. Sales believed that “pricing” did not recognize market cues and trends, causing the company’s products and solutions to be priced uncompetitively. We were initially engaged at the request of the sales organization to train the pricing team members to perform the market research the “right” way.

Using Action Mapping, we uncovered that most salespeople did not sell on value or know how to present the client with a compelling return on investment (ROI).  Instead, they often led with an offer to lower the price. We ended up delivering a series of scenario-based activities to the salespeople on the financial aspects of the sale and positioned them for better business conversation with the financial executives.

​Outcomes realized:

• The client company did not invest on unnecessary training for the pricing organization
  
  
• Retention of greater margins leading to a profitability increase
  
  
• Increased accuracy of sales forecasting

Identifying and Solving the RIGHT Problem
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Another organization engaged us to conduct leader-led training to increase the accuracy of the inputs to the software that drove the business.  Unfortunately to increase customer facing time, many salespeople were taking shortcuts entering information which inadvertently compromised its value to the business. Meanwhile the executive team was making decisions and investments based on what they saw on the software dashboard.

Knowing how important it was to solve the right problem, we encouraged the client to engage us for an Action Mapping assessment instead of jumping directly to training.  What we uncovered was that the leading cause of taking shortcuts was that much of the information had to be sourced elsewhere; pricing, discounts, products codes and more.  

​Updating the system was laborious and time consuming.  Developing and delivering traditional training to the salespeople was not the best answer.  A better and less expensive solution, which we were able to deliver to the client, was a combination of job aids and performance support embedded in the software.  

​Outcomes realized:

• Avoided unnecessary investment in training time and financial resources
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• Effective solution delivered rapidly
  
  
• Increased accuracy of data mined from the software
  
  
• Returned customer facing time to the sales organization  

​Utility Gains Unexpected Results 

​A utility in a high growth area engaged an industry partner of ours to evaluate the entirety of their customer construction communication.  We were brought in by the partner to uncover in what areas customer facing team members could improve their customer interaction and likely implement new training to help them do so.  

​While their customer satisfaction scores were already relatively high, the community was rapidly moving from a sleepy rural community to a decidedly fast-growing bedroom community.  Progressive leadership in both the town and the utility  were eager to learn about what improvements could best serve them and the many new customers they were anticipating.

Applying the Action Mapping methodology we worked with leadership to establish the specific goals they wanted to achieve.  Using our formula they came up with two:

1. “ First contact resolution will occur 100% of the time by 31 December as CSRs successfully answer all customer inquiries.”
2. “ The customers participating in the customer audit survey will rate their experience and effort shown as (an average of) 4 or greater by 31 December as techs and field crew act on feedback immediately.”

​Outcomes realized:

• Customer feedback was communicated and acted on immediately leading to an improvement trajectory
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• Customer-facing roles “practiced” internally instead of on customers with positive results
  
  
• Software adoption was improved with a sound and repeatable train-the-trainer program
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• Leadership learned how to evaluate training results which aligned with business objectives.  

With goals established, we interviewed role-centric subject matter experts to understand both what they and their colleagues needed to DO to reach the established goals and WHY they were not doing it. Specifically we were looking to understand what underlying issues or impediments might exist.

To its credit we quickly learned the utility had made substantial investment in training and had also recently implemented sophisticated new software to automate many manual processes.   Through our action mapping we found, that recommending more new training was not the solution. Rather we proposed helping our client enhance and optimize the investment they had  already made.

Among the specific areas in which we helped were activities such as: developing role plays and practice scenarios for reinforcement of training already consumed, modeling coaching and feedback conversations with leadership, establishing and documenting software “trainer” methodology, facilitating discussion on and setting up examples and templates of training measurement, and guiding the creation of job aids where required.