Sales Strategy for Learning?

[Mike Prokopeak]

I recently interviewed an sales consultant and author who says that successful salespeople are moving from being just salespeople to becoming businesspeople who sell. It got me thinking about the shift in learning away from the tactical (being just an L&D person) to being more strategic (being a businessperson with L&D expertise). As they make this transition, what lessons can learning practitioners take from successful sales people to increase their influence within the organization?

[Blair Rorani]

Learning experiences should start with a sales focus (selling the idea of forcing your brain to pay attention is worth it) and selling L and D strategies to management. What is the value? How will it improve business results?

[Jen Goemann]

The strategy of relationship based selling works for the L&D professional within their own organization. The difference is... you're selling yourself. Using techniques to develop rapport with the executives you may be consulting with is just as crucial for the learning partner to sell the relationship as it is for the sales person to sell the product. Take the time to match your skills to their needs, discover common interests to discuss, and mirror speech patterns and body language to create comfort.

My first year in my current position I still joke that I got little done other than building the relationships I needed to be effective the following year. It can be daunting at times but is well worth it when you find yourself at the table in the end! Consider consulting in a fashion that allows you to really get to know your business partners on many levels and this strategic move will pay off.

[Rob Garneau]

The key to successful sales is focusing on your customer's needs first. Many mistake selling with advocating the capabilities and strengths of what you are selling. It's generally much easier than first getting into your customer's mind and identifying what their real needs are. If you're trying to sell training, my suggestion would be to spend time up front finding out what is really needed and what will make the biggest impact on the organization.

Regards,

Rob Garneau
Founder
Bottom-Line Training

[feras]

The Concept of being Business oriented is not to change the strategies, rather moving beyond the classical tactics.

Think Big and Act small. Here we can call, Run Learning like a business, and the solutions we offer as L&D let’s us capture the things like products, and instead of saying it’s a course development, it has to be product research and development. Let’s deal with learning solution as products, and once we have moved to this tactics we will see more windows will come.

The end result, Vs ROI
Needs and Wishes Vs Competitors
Employees and Managers Vs Customer

[Diane Audrey Ravenscroft]

Hello, your insightful comments are part of the picture. For me, this is where sales and marketing intersect. What may be happening is individuals are creating 'internal marketing campaigns' in order to persuade (influence) others to consider the business benefits of learning. The tension we live with as learning practitioners is that learning is only somewhat measurable in so far as learning ABC produces result $$$. In order to promote learning programs they must be relevant and directly impact work challenges to advance competitive intelligence (and brand superiority).

[Blair Rorani]

I've found success in being able to align the tactical work with the strategic goals of the business. Designing a course is great. However, if you know how that course will impact the companies bottom line and can communicate that value to the business leader then you're on your way to a trusting, successful relationship.

[Brian D. McCarthy]

What lessons can learning practitioners take from successful sales people?

That selling the value throughout the organization is paramount to the continued growth of L&D internally and earning a spot at the big table. This is attained through networking, seeking learning entheausits internally, creating easy to understand and digest success data and branding the expeirence internaly. This is very sales like indeed as good business partnering executives are not selling, they are empowering and helping their clients.

As training organizations aim to upskill unique business competencies while tracking the success of these training events, it still falls short. Pretest, training and post test with an increase in knowledge attained through multiple choice questions does not necessarily parlay into the field or application within the organization. Folks like doing things the way they do them now. We may be able to provide learning content and measure that they comprehended the data, but 3-months down the line, was it applied or is it still applied? Most will regress to old behaviors and attitudes applying the same funcational approach or process that they have been using.

As a L&D executive, we must not only create programs that are impactful, but also measure the effectiveness of these programs and communicate in layman terms any VP and C level person would understand. We need to show a change in people, performance, attitudes, behavior and many others as this is the true value.

We started here. We trained. Now we are here (lower turnover, higher sales, better client dialogue, increased CS scoring) on a pretty excel graph. Also, here is our follow-on plan to continue this success along with our 5-year plan.

Jerry Maguire once said "Show me the Money"... What is money to an organization?

- Increased human capital performance
- Proof that attitudes and behaviors are changing
- Lower turnover
- Increased sales
- etc

L&D need to be concerned with the ability to show that all these dollars spent are equaling dollar saved. Just like sales.