I was recently approached by Phil Partington, a sales director of the company Calyx, www.calyxgroup.com . He asked me to work with his sales team to improve their performance. Phil had heard some audio files of my work and was so impressed he immediately rang me up and asked me to come in and see if I had the answer to his sales problems.

The reason why Phil wanted my help was that the company he worked for, Servicetec, had recently been bought by Calyx and the respective sales forces had been merged together under his control. That meant that he headed up a team of 10 salespeople with varying abilities and that their roles had changed quite substantially.

Phil needed the sales team to become much more like consultants to the customer's and he needed this change to happen very quickly as the new company had set him some very stretching targets to achieve. Phil particularly wanted his people to be able to deal with customers at all different levels and to have the flexibility to change their approach depending on who they were dealing with.

The solution I came up with consisted of a four-part strategy:

• Interviews with the sales team to assess their requirements.
• Pre-study work.
• A two-day intensive sales workshop.
• A series of one to one coaching sessions.

Having assessed the overall team requirement each member was given some pre-course work to complete. This work had them look at the following areas of their sales performance:

• Their biggest sales challenge?
• The seven power questions about how they saw themselves as salespeople.
• What is it that their customers want?
• Who is their best customer and why?
• Who is their worst customer and why?
• What is it that they hated about people who tried to sell to them?

I also had them complete a simple questionnaire to identify their preferred way of seeing the world. That was from the world of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and told me their preferences for how they liked to give and receive information.

The workshop took place at their offices and was designed to enable the sales team to, quite literally, be able to go into their clients world and sell to them how they want to be sold to. This requires some flexibility as most salespeople just want to sell in a way that they themselves would want to be sold to and yet most people want to buy in different ways!

We worked on the new beliefs they needed to have to be sales superstars, how to quickly, easily and effortlessly build rapport with their clients no matter the level of person that they were dealing with. We also looked at how they could discover exactly what their clients wanted and how their clients would know when they have it, thus enabling them to become consultants rather than just selling products. We then discovered a way of finding out their clients buying strategies and their preferred way of being presented to. Finally we put all of this together in a series of wrong place to enable them to really embed their new found skills.

Phil and his sales team are delighted with the results they are now achieving as a result of going through this process and here are some examples of what they have said:

“Fantastic! Loved it!”
Rob Allen – Account Manager Calyx

“I really enjoyed having my mind opened to a new way of working”
Niall O’Regan – Account Manager Calyx

Overall, They not only have their sales dramatically improved, enabling Phil and his team to smash their stretching targets, but they have substantially increased their conversion rate for gaining new customers and their ability to retain existing customers.

Bill Robinson