Client Need
A leading American software company was in the process of improving customer understanding to increase opportunities and achieve the next level of growth. This vision to improve customer understanding required sellers to enhance their knowledge of the buyers of each product line, the competitive market, and how to adjust the overall sales process to bring value to client engagements.
To heighten their sellers’ skills, the organization partnered with BTS, a trusted partner that had supported the organization on a variety of development initiatives over the years.
Solution
To develop this customer understanding, BTS and the organization collaborated to create a customized solution. The organization’s leadership team was charged with identifying the key behavior changes participants needed to make, and in partnership with BTS, created a learning journey to help employees acquire the knowledge and build the skills necessary to engage differently with their customers.
The result was a three-day program as a part of that year’s sales kickoff meeting, which was conducted virtually and delivered to 3,000 employees over the course of three-hour sessions, run multiple times a day to accommodate the global audience.
Participants went through an immersive business simulation to help them gain a deeper understanding of the market and competition. The simulation was anchored in a case study, which was modeled directly after the organization’s customers’ business, moving through the challenges that the organization was best positioned to resolve.
In the simulation, participants were immersed in a fictional environment, which prompted them to not see from an executive and tactical buyer point of view, but also enable them to build empathy and develop clear insights into their buyers and organizational objectives. Doing so allowed participants to obtain a comprehensive understanding of their competitor’s value proposition and how to differentiate themselves in an aggressive marketplace.
In addition to building customer understanding, participants brought competitive “battle cards” to life in the scope of the simulation. They put themselves in the shoes of their top competitors, focusing on how those competitors across product lines differentiate themselves from the organization.
At the end of each day, participants shifted back to the perspective of their everyday role in a moments-based simulation, allowing them the unique opportunity to practice new behaviors throughout all phases of the sales process. These predominantly concentrated on meeting specific customer needs, but also touched on value proposition and getting to the close of a sale.
Results
Ultimately, leaders of the company observed that their workforce adopted the behaviors needed to become more customer-centric, and more effective through its sales process. Based on these insights, the company transitioned the content created for the sales kickoff meeting to their sales onboarding, which demonstrates the overall success of the learning experience.
