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| Better learning strategy can produce business metamorphosis |
To do this we need a significant cultural transformation – a complete metamorphosis in the way people work together. We need to look at the way people interact. The way they communicate together, learn together and share information and expertise. The way they develop their potential: individually, as a team and as an organisation.
Start by challenging your learning and development strategy. Increasingly, this comes under the umbrella of organisational development or talent development. Some still call it training and development. Whatever you call it, what we’re interested in here is how we help the people in an organisation to focus on developing their ability to perform at their highest potential, and do it consistently.
In my book, that’s called learning. So, for the rest of the article, I’ll use the term learning and development, because it most accurately describes what we’re trying to help people to do: to learn and develop.
I want to illustrate how better learning and development can give us better performance, do it fast and in a way that lasts. I’d like to share a case study of an organisation I’ve worked with. Names and sensitive details must be changed to protect the innocent, so let’s call the organisation Business Financial Services (apologies to anyone actually using this as a trading name – suggest they think of a better one).
Like many organisations, BFS operated in a mature and increasingly commoditised market sector, where the main players found it difficult to innovate and find a strategic differentiator in terms of ‘product’. Hence, the market had become very price sensitive, driving margins lower and lower.
What made BFS different? The business leaders recognised that it was hopeless for the business to try to innovate in terms of better technology or products if it didn’t have salespeople who could demonstrate how these new products would add value for the customer. So the first place to focus for a strategic differentiator was the people, not the product.
When I first started working with BFS they had some great ideas, but a legacy of under-achievement. Revenue was falling and there were some serious performance issues. They had no learning and development structures in place and consequently most of the salespeople were not on target. Staff turnover was high, so there were a lot of inexperienced recent starters from outside the industry. They weren’t getting much help to learn the ropes, and despite their best efforts they were taking up to twelve months just to develop the industry knowledge they needed to make their first sale.
From past performance we knew that for salespeople to achieve their annual targets, they needed to attend at least eight face-to-face business appointments per week and make at least two sales a week. Consequently these were the sales activity KPIs that we decided to manage salespeople to. We adopted them as the KPIs for the new learning and development strategy.
The core elements of the new learning and development strategy were:
- A comprehensive five-day induction course covering all the core knowledge required
- A two-day consultative sales-skills workshop to help new hires combine their existing sales skills with their new industry knowledge
- Creation of small sales teams of six salespeople per sales manager to allow close coaching and support of salespeople on KPIs, sales skills and personal development
- In-depth workshops for sales managers in leadership, motivation, change management and, critically, coaching skills
- On-going ‘coach the coach’ sessions for all sales managers
- An online learning network to support the induction workshops and provide on-going learning and development for salespeople throughout their first year
Despite the seemingly hopeless situation we started with, we were able to successfully implement this learning and development strategy.
The results were gratifying. The average salesperson’s performance doubled in the first year. By the end of the project, new salespeople were regularly hitting target within just two weeks of joining the company – a company with a renewed sense of purpose based on working together to learn, develop and grow.
