The Client
A Fortune 500, world-leading brand in the software industry.
Need / Challenge
Clarity’s client is well-regarded as a great place to work. The client offers a range of software products, but faced a challenge with its sales force leading with selling products rather than business issues. The corporation’s marketing organization foresaw greater opportunity by having sales people focus on customer use cases—that is, solving specific business problems. This required a new approach to sales, but the sales force and field sales managers could not be brought in for a centralized re-training program. A training solution was required that could allow non-trainers, specifically field sales managers, to easily facilitate re-education among their respective staffs without disrupting business operations.
Solution: What Clarity Did
Clarity’s consultant had over 20 years’ experience in training development for sales organizations, and designing new curricula completely from scratch. For such a wide-ranging shift in marketing and sales philosophy, soliciting input and acceptance across the stakeholder organizations required solid skills in cross-functional networking and collaboration on the part of the consultant.
Starting with an audience analysis, and understanding the demands on the people who would be required to deliver the training, Clarity’s consultant narrowed the marketing use cases down to the top six. The consultant focused on shifting thinking away from products and features to focusing on challenges and customer business needs through “discovery conversations.” Rather than take a traditional, formal classroom training approach, Clarity’s consultant designed a solution that helped busy sales managers coach sales trainees to role play the desired approach.
Simultaneously, Clarity’s consultant worked cross-functionally with the client’s technical staff to identify the changes required with the client’s Learning Management System to allow field sales managers to update staff progress in the new curriculum.
Results: The Outcomes
The client said: “I’ve had the pleasure to work with [Clarity’s consultant] for 18 months, and he never ceased to impress me. On both sales and technical projects, I watched him create structure from chaos. He geared up on a sales program that was conceptually a new approach for the entirety of our company; while many struggled to grasp the new concept, he ran with it…working effectively and efficiently with stakeholders, SMEs, instructional designers and production personnel. He always started with consideration for the overall learner experience, and then whittled the content into concise detail for a clear development roadmap. And I always envied his presentations and visuals.”
Quotes from Consultant
“In this highly collaborative environment, it was challenging to know when I had a green light, meaning that many people needed to review but were hesitant to make decisions. This required considerable cross-functional and communication skills, to get buy in and approvals.
The incredible people at were awesome to work with! I was given the latitude needed to think outside the box in creating this program and seeing it through to a successful conclusion.
