Sales

The brief

A major New Zealand media company was facing a softening advertising market. The fight for the advertiser’s dollar was about to become a lot tougher. Looking at the capabilities of their national sales organisation, it became clear that their sales professionals needed to go beyond the previous focus on relationship building.

The solution

The first step was a meeting between the company’s National Sales Director and The Learning Wave. We discussed the company’s strategic need to build strong selling and negotiating skills at all levels.

Next, The Learning Wave team went away and developed a completely new sales training programme salesFUEL. Modules were created to shift the sales perspective and create a new focus on customer needs. Instead of the ‘attack model’, where the selling process is portrayed as a mission to extract the customer’s wallet, Sales FUEL concentrated on teaching sales people how to build a partnership with customers.

The Learning Wave then invested in attention-grabbing materials to ensure we could deliver memorable training sessions. Experienced sales trainers developed a learning structure to ensure the whole experience would surprise, challenge and generate insights amongst the participants. Sessions were tailored to cater for the different requirements of staff at various levels, from entry-level sales positions to National Account Managers.

A key part of the programme was the inclusion of one-to-one coaching sessions once participants had returned to the job. This proved vital in embedding new skills away from the highly charged environment of a three-day sales course.

The result

Selling advertising is one of the toughest challenges for a sales professional. You have to retail empty space and time, while justifying the value to a succession of hard-nosed clients.

Sales FUEL provided the tools to succeed. In softening market, the company managed to maintain its sales levels at historic dollar values. More than that, it took market share off key competitors. Sales FUEL is now a key part of the company’s training programmes and is provided as an ongoing skills upgrade for their sales professionals.

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