An HR Outsourcing firm had built its business by offering customized products and services to large corporate clients, and needed to convert these clients toward more standard offerings in order to free up resources and improve profitability
Business Issue
An HR Outsourcing firm had done an outstanding job of bringing in new corporate clients, but found that their original business model of offering customized solutions to each client had caused profits to erode. In simple terms, it was too costly to service existing clients and to win new clients with a continuation of this "lift and shift” business model. Management realized that existing clients had to be migrated toward fewer and more standardized product/service offerings, and identified influence and negotiation skills as a critical component in their success.
Sales Training Needs Assessment
All client facing employees were identified as the primary audience for a training workshop. Peak Selling used an internal survey with these employees and their managers, in order to identify the specific challenges and areas for improvement. Two common themes emerged. First, and most important, resistance-to-change by existing clients was viewed as a barrier to success. Why should a client change, especially if there was no perceived value to the client to make the change? Second, the client-facing employees anticipated that there would also be a need to influence colleagues who worked in operations because these back-office employees were accustomed to doing things the "old way”.
Sales Training Solution
Peak Selling designed a customized workshop to address these challenges, drawing notably on Peak Selling's workshops such as Influence Skills and Sales Negotiating Skills. Client-specific role play exercises were written to ensure that all of the practice activities were very realistic. A series of reinforcement tools and resources were also provided, notably a detailed summary of Best Practices on how to handle the most likely client objections such as "Why should I change?” and "Who will pay for this?” The company developed metrics to measure progress of the client migration initiative. When the training concluded, they exceeded their quarterly and annual targets.