Karen P. Summey
Conover, North Carolina
828.466.1822
karen@karensummey.com

Accomplishments

Situation/Task:
Develop a cost-effective means of training geographically remote sales representatives on numerous topics. Further, provide team-building activities for whole groups of team members, as organized by their target markets.

Current situation:

• Traditional training method: fly in representatives for 1/2 - 3 days of individual, informal training
• Costs: air travel, housing, meals, rental car(s), incidentals, travel time/lost opportunity costs in field for both learners and instructors
• Other issues: little or no opportunity for networking/mentoring with other representatives and support personnel, no training consistency or repeatability with informal sessions
• Alternative considered, but rejected: e-learning; a small target population (<100) and high development costs did not provide appropriate return on investment (Before the year 2000, learning management systems were more costly and less intuitive.)
  

Action:
Established a Sales Training Conference Week on an annual (or semi-annual) basis

Specifics:

• Five full, consecutive days of training
• 30 to 75 scheduled sessions (including redundant offerings)
  • Length varying from 30 minutes to 3 days
  • Location: corporate building; 8 training/conference rooms
• Advance, voluntary participant registration
  • New reps attended established curriculum courses first
    • Basic sales skills
    • Account and territory management
    • Laptop computer applications
• Instructors:
• Product training: product line managers or specialists
• Laptop computer applications: information technology specialists
• Sales skills: contracted third-party suppliers
• Special sessions: sales/corporate training specialists, human resources, managers/executives
• Turnkey management provided by Training Specialist:
  • Event calendar scheduling
  • Session needs analyses
  • Travel arrangements (group fare air travel, ground transportation, housing)
  • Instructor identification and contracts
  • Marketing liaison for product mock-ups (demo products and equipment)
  • Classroom and presentation equipment reservations
  • Session scheduling and registrations
  • Participant materials
  • Food services
  • Event communications and promotions
  • Post-event evaluations and management follow-up
    

Results:
The Annual Sales Training Conference was hailed as a tremendous success by executives, sales representatives, instructors, etc. It provided:

• Consistent, high quality product training
• Laptop computer training or refreshers
• Sales curriculum completion
• Networking between team members, as well as support personnel (customer service, marketing, IT, etc.)
• Additional benefits: cross-training of marketing personnel, customer service representatives, and other employees interested in various topic sessions
• Economies of scale:
  • Decreased transportation costs from air travel group fares
  • Shared ground transportation
  • Dedicated week of training eliminated need for multiple trips:
    • Travel time decreased, particularly cross-country and internationally
    • Numerous, individual air tickets eliminated for multiple yearly trips
    • Tremendous drop in lost opportunity costs for sales representatives and internal instructors
• Re-energized sales force!