A multi-billion dollar medical device company specializing in women’s health found it had outgrown its sales training program when new leadership and new expectations exposed just how ineffective the current model was at supporting people and profits.

Led by Marketing, this organization’s training approach needed to become more sales-driven to catch up with leadership’s ambitious vision for the future. The existing program was not only inadequate at motivating Sales and Customers, but it was now breaking down under new pressures.

Here’s how this at-risk program was revamped to activate sales staff, build trust across Sales and Marketing, cultivate credibility, and equip teams to better drive revenue growth. 

The Problem:

If you’ve ever been in proximity to a sales-driven organization, you know that the mission to generate revenue permeates the culture. There’s a big focus on helping reps increase their effectiveness, which is why a buttoned-up sales training strategy is so critical to success.

So, when my client redesigned its organizational structure from hiring medical device reps with industry experience to hiring talent based on their aptitude for sales, it didn’t take long to reveal just how unprepared the Marketing-led training team was for this radical shift. 

Instead of hiring people with technical or industry expertise, new reps were coming in with zero knowledge of the Medical-device space and no knowledge of how to sell med-device products. This created a big problem for the client who didn’t have the mechanisms in place to:

• Quickly teach the right amount of technical knowledge to new hires 

• Offer learning paths and channels that would help each rep engage with the tools that best supported them

• Provide real-world, practical resources and trainings that translated to effective customer conversations

• Measure new-hire sales readiness and learning success

Not only did the client need a new sales training program yesterday, but they also needed an approach that was scalable and designed for the types of candidates they were recruiting. Without it, they would never be able to inspire sales reps or motivate customers.

The Approach:

To catch the training approach up with the ambitions of the organization, Xcelerate developed a Sales-Training Strategy that utilized key adult learning principles to help sales retain and leverage knowledge, including:

• Right-sizing the use of different learning channels to help reps engage with the tools that best supported them, with recommended learning tracks for each sales role

• Leveraging the SMEs across the organization, and creating frameworks and curriculums that would remove the burden placed on SMEs to master adult learning principles and know what (and how) to teach Sales 

• Product training that went beyond product specs and was more reflective of the inputs sales reps actually need to facilitate meaningful customer conversations

• A plan to create and align on a set of performance standards set by sales leadership, and recommendations for a new organizational structure to support it

• Assessments to identify learning gaps and gauge readiness among sales reps, as well as a proposal for how to measure effectiveness in the future

• High-level implementation next steps to chart the course

By completely redesigning the company’s approach to Sales training, the program could better activate the Sales team with an approach that would be scalable and measurable. 

The Solution:

The strategic plan for Sales Training needed to help sales reps become more effective in their roles, and quickly, in order to achieve the company’s aggressive revenue targets. Xcelerate redesigned the client’s outdated training approach with a robust Sales Training Program that emphasized some key philosophies and principles: 

1. The voice of sales is critical to the design of a learning program in a Sales-driven organization.

Sales was put in the driver's seat to identify critical competencies, approve learning goals, provide input on instructional methods, and beyond. Processes were established so that Sales could have increased visibility to learning-experience design, the opportunity to prioritize the team’s focus, and ongoing collaboration between a Marketing-led Sales Training function and the Sales organization. 

2. Increased collaboration and trust yield increased performance.

Sales Training became Training and Development, replacing sales trainers with Area Performance Managers (APMs) whose responsibility it was to partner with regional sales leadership (RSMs) to identify knowledge or performance gaps. The APM would design both regional and individual development programs to address knowledge and skills gaps in key performance areas. As a result, the partnership between the APMs and the RSMs increased trust and collaboration, supporting the sales-driven culture and enabling best-practice, individualized learning approaches to drive performance. 

3. Product spec sheets and marketing collateral are NOT training materials.

The existing sales training program had a major opportunity to supplement marketing materials and tech-spec presentations with impactful e-learning, virtual and classroom training. Rather than overload the reps with information and leave them to distill the important details, the new approach to training would help them understand the most pertinent information to their role, with an emphasis on retention of key concepts vs reference of tech specs. The approach also replaced the “academic” classroom learning with realistic scenarios and real-life applications with clear learning objectives that reflected what sales reps actually face when selling to customers.

4. Delivering effective field learning experiences requires thoughtful design, not institutional knowledge.

Previously, Field Sales Trainers were selected based on willingness, rather than their ability to teach, or their sales performance. Not only were they also managing their own territories, but they had no direction around what the trainee needed to learn or how to teach them. Rather than having a consistent approach to training reps, each field trainer charted their own course based on institutional knowledge (often to the detriment of the trainee). The new strategy introduced a curriculum and learning materials to support the Field Sales Trainer to create learning experiences that matched what the trainee most needed. This would also ensure that those materials were created in alignment with sales leadership (rather than in a vacuum, as was the default approach). 

5. A truly strategic plan includes measurement tools and assessment checkpoints. Tying together learning and sales performance is essential.

All too often, training teams rate a program’s success based on the number of people who participated, or how much they enjoyed the training. But that’s not really an impactful data point. My client wasn’t running any before-and-after assessments, so most trainees were being rewarded for their ability to regurgitate memorized facts, which is not the same as demonstrating learned information and behaviors. The new approach would test for growth and different learning milestones to gauge progress, and reps would receive clear expectations around competency testing for their roles. This would help identify and eliminate learning gaps, and offer a real way to evaluate effectiveness.  Additionally, the program compared and contrasted the sales performance of reps with their level of knowledge and selling skills, making the financial case for learning.

The Outcomes:

The strategy and design built credibility and buy-in with Sales. The new partnership between Sales and Marketing helped Sales move from being dubious, negative and reluctant to engage, to becoming enthusiastic supporters of the new strategy because they felt it was really designed for them. 

The sales team now feels seen and heard, and has a training program made for their needs, making revenue generation and growth a whole lot more attainable.