10 ways to wire sales training: How AT&T used a Web-enabled process to improve sales skills and connect them to the bottom line - analysis

T+D, April, 2002 by Joe Henderson, Gregg Crawford

This could be the most pressing question of the decade: What does it take to implement a performance improvement initiative that delivers measurable bottom-line results?

Over the past few years, AT&T'S business-to-business sales organization enhanced its approach to improving sales profitability and customer satisfaction, and is now seeing the results. The goals were to show their sales-force new ways to expand value for customers and to motivate profitable behavior change in the field. The strategy: Implement a comprehensive combination of training and Internet technology that would connect corporate strategic challenges with skill-development investments, online performance support, accreditation, and bottom-line results tracking.

Like most corporations, AT&T has offered negotiation-skills training--including BayGroup's workshop Negotiating to Win--to its business-to-business sales professionals for many years. As the 1990s came to a close and competition in the telecommunications industry intensified, AT&T's senior management demanded that time out of field for sales training be limited to programs that contributed directly to the achievement of critical corporate objectives. A review of the new challenges facing AT&T's account executives made clear that that approach was necessary and that changes had to be made in how AT&T developed its sales team.

In-depth interviews of sales professionals and their managers, confirmed by data collected during sales training workshops, uncovered a number of emerging challenges to selling AT&T's value profitably:

* a growing commodity mindset among customers, who were finding it harder to differentiate between competitive offerings

* increasing price pressure, which was now present in every purchase

* more-sophisticated buyers, who often had significant telecommunications purchasing experience and were now more likely to be represented by aggressive telecommunications consultants

* deregulation, including the removal of tariffs on many telecommunications services. With the emergence of detariffing, AT&T risked its sales professionals negotiating costly, difficult-to-implement customer agreements.

* expanded product-services portfolio. AT&T'S value proposition, which had in the past rested largely in high-quality long-distance service, was now built on its ability to offer a wide variety of other services, including high-speed data Internet services such as Web hosting, and telecommunications outsourcing.

* increased customer-service demands, which made it imperative for sales professionals to set customer expectations at levels that could be met and exceeded during sales and installation.

In that environment, negotiation skills clearly were critical to building customer satisfaction and corporate profitability.

Calling on counterintuitive

As AT&T assessed its options for changing the negotiating behavior of its sales professionals, it became clear that training workshops alone wouldn't produce the lasting behavioral changes needed.

The reason is simple: Good negotiating is counterintuitive. When faced with the stress of customer negotiations, the natural tendency of sales professionals is to do the opposite of what they should do. Similar to American tourists in London who intuitively look left instead of right before crossing a street, most salespeople usually find that the habits they've developed over the years can lead to costly (and sometimes unexpected) results.

Faced with that reality; AT&T decided to take a multipronged systems approach to improving performance, using a Web-based tool called DealMaker as the back-bone. That represented a significant evolution in the company's approach to sales-skill development, integrating performance support tools to reinforce workshop training.

The system has these major components, all supported and linked with the online tool:

Blended experiential training. New skills are developed in the classroom, then reinforced online. The Negotiating to Win workshop builds counterintuitive skills by exposing sales professionals to actual negotiations, in which they can make intuitive mistakes in a safe environment, increase their motivation to change by gaining "aha" insights into their current behavior, and practice new skills in a simulated setting.

Participants are also introduced to, and trained to use, the online performance support tool, which reinforces key workshop concepts, supports online planning, and provides opportunities to review content and assess knowledge. Workshop graduates receive semi-weekly email reminders to use key skills learned in training our in the field and to share their experiences with management via email.

Online planning and knowledge management. DealMaker, available to users anytime online, provides just-in-time sales negotiation planning support, as well as best-practice information, strategies, and approaches gathered from AT&T's highest performing sales professionals.

A user enters information about a customer and receives AT&T-specific planning assistance to help negotiate agreements that boost customer satisfaction and account profitability. The tool prompts sales reps to think creatively about ways to uncover and meet customer needs, anticipate and recognize model answers to tough customer questions, and plan effective concession strategies. The tool then provides a "what to do" strategy for the rep in the upcoming negotiation.