Partnership Sales Case Study

In Brief
Two months following training in "Partnership Sales", a sales force of just under 26 persons reported:


In addition, senior management has acknowledged improved relationships, contacts and communications with customers and prospects. These results were partly achieved by our consulting service, which included:
  1. Involvement of people at all levels of the client organization throughout each program development and training cycle;
  2. Measurement of actual sales impact as a result of training at each step along the way. Background This consumer product manufacturer was faced with extremely strong and well entrenched competition in the United States.
Their main competitor controlled 60% of the market share in the category and a second strong competitor split most of the balance of the market share.

Account Manager's Function
The company's products are marketed by a direct sales organization and sold through a number of retail trade channels. Trade relationships in this category are controlled by multi-year contracts that essentially give exclusive distribution rights to a single supplier. Once these long term contracts are established, the role that the account manager plays is to act as a marketing "partner" with trade accounts in order to drive the volume and profitability of their products according to the marketing strategies established in consultation and coordination with their accounts. Another objective of the account manager is to protect the account against competitive encroachment during contract periods in order to secure contract renewals at the end of their terms. Another account management responsibility is to establish relationships at competitive accounts in order to have opportunities to capture new accounts from competition during renewal periods.

Consulting Service Contracted
MR Communication Consultants were contacted because of our reputation and experience in culture change consulting as well as our extensive custom and generic sales and sales management training capabilities that have been used by hundreds of companies internationally over the past twenty years.

Understanding that culture change requires a series of interventions over a period of time in order to have lasting impact, and understanding that improvement of the selling organization to achieve recognized "best in industry" status also requires a long-term, planned approach, MRCC recommended a series of consulting and training experiences that were customized or tailored to the actual sales "reality" this client's salespeople faced everyday in their markets.

Recommendations
The recommended training consisted of modules of Change Management and Coaching for Managers, and training in account penetration strategies, presentations skills, and negotiation skills for the salespeople.

Additionally, MRCC introduced a custom version of our highly successful Partnership Sales program as a key element of both culture change (all salespeople, sales managers and support staff participated in the training), as well as advanced sales skills development. The key focus of this program is to enable people to establish a "Partnership" philosophy of long-term relationship development with their existing accounts and prospects. Because of the nature of this business, this long-term philosophy was deemed critically important to imbue into the selling organization.

Our approach was unique in that it contained the two critical elements: Results

Workshop Evaluation
In the case of Partnership Sales an assessment was completed at the end of each training segment as to program design, instructor effectiveness, program value to the participant, and overall program rating. Since most participants tended to be highly experienced account managers (an average of 10+ years in sales), the feedback came from a very demanding audience. The outcome of this assessment was excellent receptivity. On a five point scale of 5 being excellent, 4 being very good,... 1 being poor, the ratings were as follow: Program Design 4.4 Instructor Effectiveness 4.4 Overall Program Value 4.3 Overall Rating 4.4

Feedback
Two months after the training, MRCC completed a retrospective field survey with the objective of determining the actual sales impact that Partnership Sales had helped participants in the training develop.

Because of our interest in obtaining candid feedback, the survey was a blind survey with no requirement for respondents to identify themselves. Notwithstanding the confidentiality, we received an extraordinary 96% response rate to the survey from program participants.

Specifically, we asked the following questions:

"Do you believe that you are using the concepts that you learned in your day-to-day activities?"

Feedback: 94% of participants answered "Yes"

"Do you believe that the concepts that you learned have helped or will help develop business that you might not have developed or that you might not have developed so completely?"

Feedback: 53% of participants said "Yes, I believe it has helped". The other 47% said "I'm not sure, but believe it will be helpful in the future."

"If you believe that the training has been useful in your business development efforts, please describe an example of where and how it may have been of assistance. Please quantify the outcome that you've obtained, if possible, and be specific on which skills you learned in Partnership Sales made the difference in getting the business or in improving long term relationships."

Feedback: 23% of respondents indicated actual signed orders they attributed to specific concepts learned in the training. Total value of signed business so attributed was in excess of $400,000.

34% of respondents indicated either forecasted business or other positive account outcomes that they attributed to specific concepts learned in the training. The responses included: $12 million in new account contracts that were on forecast to close within the next few months after the survey. Lastly, over two-thirds of the selling organization indicated that the key outcomes of Partnership Sales for them were:

The outcomes of the consulting work at this account have been summarized and presented to senior management and have been judged to be very persuasive evidence that their investment of time and resources has been effective in assisting them in implementing their key strategies of: