Challenge

Develop a program to educate and motivate the global sales team of one of the world’s best-known hardware vendors to sell cloud products.

Results

• Program rolled out to 10,000 global sales colleagues.
• Adoption and satisfaction levels for the program ranked as 4.5 and 4.8 out of 5 respectively.

Approach

The company’s move to cloud was viewed skeptically by the market and its sales teams so, Strategy to Revenue needed to get the sales team to assimilate the new products and understand the new market dynamics, fast. Having previously worked with the vendor to roll-out sales skills training and coaching, the team focused on creating easily digestible packages of material. The first package focused on delivering the required knowledge on the opportunity, the value proposition and the competitor environment. The second delivered the learning modules on sales skills most relevant to the new product line. Each package included explanation videos, tutorials, interactive worksheets and role-based task. Overviews of the compensation plan and links to the sales enablement platforms helped the sales teams understand the financial incentives linked to the new business model. A deliberate decision to provide a mix of smartphone and PC-based learning modules ensured the right content was accessible in the right environments. With the sales team up skilled and knowledgeable enough to start selling, the final phase focused on workshops. The output was individual and team work plans, giving each team the momentum and urgency required to implement the new learnings in the field.