Manufacturing Archives | Challenger Inc Challenger Sales Wed, 02 Oct 2024 17:17:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 https://challengerinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/cropped-Challenger-favicon-48x48.jpg Manufacturing Archives | Challenger Inc 32 32 How MSC Built a Sales Coaching and Reinforcement Machine https://challengerinc.com/blog/how-to-build-a-sales-coaching-and-reinforcement-machine/ Fri, 20 Sep 2024 16:58:53 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=blog&p=124657 No matter how enthusiastic the seller response from a workshop or kickoff, they won’t truly adopt the skills and behaviors that lead to higher performance without reinforcement.

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You’ve heard the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall. Strangely, the same directions apply to success in selling: Practice, practice, practice.

No matter how enthusiastic the seller response from a workshop or kickoff, they won’t truly adopt the skills and behaviors that lead to higher performance without reinforcement. And to build a culture that supports skill adoption, you need to not just teach skills but foster an approach that shows your team the benefits of change.

Challengers recognize this as a three-part framework we call the Skill, the Will, and the Hill:

  • The Skill Pinpoint the Challenger skills that sellers need most
  • The Will Alleviate resistance and drive sellers to take action in modifying their behavior
  • The Hill Create an environment that allows for experimentation and learning

For MSC Industrial Supply, a Challenger client, the Hill turned out to be the key that unlocked the Skill and the Will among its sellers.

MSC supports its customers in the manufacturing industry by helping them lower costs, drive productivity, and eliminate waste in their manufacturing operations (MRO).

For years MSC sellers relied on relationships, offering fast delivery of its millions of products. But MSC’s leadership realized that, to stay competitive, they needed to shift their approach from selling parts shipped “just in time” to proactively providing Insights and other items of value.

As they adopted Challenger, they faced skepticism from a deeply tenured salesforce, numbering in the thousands, who weren’t too sure about changing how they approached sales — in some cases, for decades.

By building Challenger into the sales process, including coaching conversations, MSC signaled to its salesforce that these skills were central to their success. They also landed on an important realization: in using Challenger, MSC’s sellers delivered a better experience to their customers.

MSC uses a customer model known as MRO Go as a framework for continuous improvement. This aligned well to Challenger’s approach to account growth, which shows that accounts grow not from stellar service but from providing unique perspectives designed to grow business throughout the lifetime of an account.

customer model MRO Go

As they saw this resonate with customers, sales and enablement leaders at MSC asked themselves: how do we create this same kind of continuous improvement model within our sales team?

And so, the Sales Mastery Program was born.

Externally, MSC’s sellers use the same framework to guide customers to continuous improvement, but often customize their solutions (because no two customers are alike!).

Changing seller behavior requires a similar approach. So as they rolled Challenger out across their teams, they customized development plans for each seller, aligned to four different levels.

As MSC’s sellers and sales managers move through the Sales Mastery Program, they complete capstone activities and assessments to move onto the next level — requiring sellers to reinforce the skills they learn in workshops beyond on-the-job activities.

This approach also opened benefits to managers and coaches. To successfully reinforce Challenger, managers need to understand not just what to coach, but how to coach. By adopting the Sales Mastery Program, MSC’s coaches were able to better understand Challenger concepts themselves, track seller skills development, and zero in on the skills their sellers needed to focus on developing. They also measured their own ability to coach and pinpointed areas of improvement and development for themselves.

Through the development of this program, MSC’s focus resulted in sustained skills adoption across their three selling divisions: Business Development, National Accounts, and Field Sales. It aligned their leadership and improved capacity for sales managers.

Which all sounds great … but what really matters is results.

Over the course of the first two years into the Sales Mastery Program, MSC reported:

  • Improved speed and efficiency in its sales cycle
  • Increased pipeline velocity
  • Increase in sellers contributing to overall growth
  • And a significant boost in win rates

And all of this — the very results that sales leaders dream of achieving — comes from their commitment to strengthening coaching and building a program designed to reinforce the unique selling skills and behaviors that set Challengers apart.

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Consumer Packaged Goods | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/consumer-packaged-goods-sales-training/ Sun, 04 Dec 2022 15:39:45 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121846 Kimberly-Clark is a leading global consumer packaged goods company focused on delivering products and solutions that provide care for a better world. The company has three primary product groupings: personal care products, consumer tissue products, and professional workplace products.

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Revenue: $20.4B
Employees: 46K

Client Challenge

In the highly commoditized consumer packaged goods industry, Kimberly-Clark was searching for a way to differentiate. With products that are often seen as commodities, the company wanted to differentiate itself through its messaging to overcome two key issues: selling premium products in an increasingly commoditized market and experiencing decreasing profit margins due to heavy discount concessions.

Solution

Challenger helped evolve how Kimberly-Clark communicated its value. While the company previously cited that its products killed 98% of germs and regularly offered discount packages, the Challenger messaging process revealed a more compelling reason to buy: 5.3% of payroll is dedicated to illness-related employee absences. Imagine eliminating this issue by keeping employees healthy every day in partnership with Kimberly-Clark.

Results:

We helped the organization derive research-based commercial insights and craft messages that uncovered powerful invisible truths about its customers’ businesses. Challenger marketing shifted the conversation to Kimberly-Clark’s unique differentiators and away from features and benefits, turning the organization into a trusted partner rather than just a vendor.

Quotes

“There was a big benefit to using Challenger skills and messages compared to my negotiations the last time around. I believe it was much more difficult for customers to throw up roadblocks because they felt that I was bringing value and knowledge to their business.”

Kimberly-Clark Professional Sales Representative



Quotes

“There was a big benefit to using Challenger skills and messages compared to my negotiations the last time around. I believe it was much more difficult for customers to throw up roadblocks because they felt that I was bringing value and knowledge to their business.”

Kimberly-Clark Professional Sales Representative



Before Challenger

  • We have cleaning and hygiene products to help your employees keep the workplace free of bacteria. Tests show these products kill 98% of germs, which is especially important this flu season. Your last order was placed approximately six months ago, so it’s probably time to replenish your supply. We can even offer a 10% discount if you place the order today. How many boxes can we get you?

After Challenger

  • As you know, a huge issue affecting the productivity and cost of employing your workforce is their ability to show up to work consistently. What you may not know is that 5.3% of your payroll is dedicated to compensating for unplanned absences and that most of these absences are within your control as an organization. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Remember, these illnesses are preventable. So, you don’t have to just accept that your employees will get sick this year, be less productive due to their illnesses, and ultimately cost a huge chunk of payroll.



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Industrial Manufacturing | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/industrial-manufacturing/ Sat, 03 Dec 2022 16:50:08 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121873 Flowserve Corporation is a leading provider of fluid motion and control solutions, including pumps, valves, and mechanical seals, for the world’s toughest, most critical applications. The company operates in more than 300 locations in over 50 countries.

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Revenue: $3.5B
Employees: 15K

Client Challenge

Flowserve sales engineers were accustomed to traditional sales methods focused on product features and technical specifics. The organization had made limited investments to build a consistent global sales methodology or to develop coaching capabilities among its frontline managers and engineering community.

These factors left Flowserve’s sales engineers feeling greater pressure to perform in a changing and more complex customer environment. Its market challenges included:

  • Growing competition from low-cost international competitors
  • A changing demographic among their customer set, with different perspectives and experience
  • Customers with more sources for information, alternatives, and a greater need for consensus when making a purchase decision

Solution

Together with Challenger, Flowserve took a holistic view of its sales and marketing organization and identified key strategic gaps to close, including commercial insight, sales experience capability, and coaching support.

  • Commercial insight: Flowserve dug deep into the minds of its biggest customers, looking for knowledge gaps and a suboptimal approach to running operations. Those gaps were quantified with a clear business case for change that led uniquely to Flowserve as the best partner and supplier.
  • Coaching: Before field teams could deliver this new commercial insight, Flowserve invested in manager coaching capabilities to better support the change. The fundamental coaching shift was to forward-looking and skill-based coaching interactions and away from simple performance and metrics management. 
  • Capability: Flowserve assembled its sales engineers together for two days of region-configured Challenger skill-building workshops. These sessions combined expert facilitation (in the local language) focused on centrally built commercial insights, manager coaching support, and the application of skills and messages to real accounts. Following the workshops, sales engineers continued to practice new skills through a reinforcement plan that used video-based practice and targeted manager feedback.

Implementing a behavioral transformation in their global field force was a complex endeavor, including workshops for over 1,200 managers and frontline sales engineers in 10 different languages across five continents, each with cultural sensitivities and market nuances.  



Results:

Challenger and Flowserve leadership quickly noticed a fundamental change in the way sales engineers approached customer interactions, including greater preparation for sales interactions and overall engagement across the field. In the six months following the Challenger skill workshops, Flowserve realized the following results:

  • $75 million in closed business directly attributed to the use of Challenger skills in sales interactions with customers
  • Over 75% of sales engineers reported more thorough preparation for sales interactions
  • 78% of sales engineers reported more meaningful sales conversations with customers

Quotes

“Challenger’s methodical approach illustrates many skills other programs have lacked, and I’ve been in sales for over 20 years. Although sensitive with some customers, taking control and building constructive tension are vital to ignite low-priority opportunities forward.”

Flowserve Sales Engineer, North America

Quotes

“Challenger’s methodical approach illustrates many skills other programs have lacked, and I’ve been in sales for over 20 years. Although sensitive with some customers, taking control and building constructive tension are vital to ignite low-priority opportunities forward.”

Flowserve Sales Engineer, North America

Before Challenger

  • Flowserve is a leading supplier of pumps, seals, and valves for large CapEx projects like yours. We have the expertise to walk you through each stage of development to reduce delays and improve plant uptime.

After Challenger

  • Many engineers underestimate the impact that comes from using equipment from multiple vendors. Minor fluctuations in capacity, specifications, and repair processes across multiple suppliers can turn a small repair into a large-scale systemic issue. This can bring your facility offline and cost you more than you realize.



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Industrial Technology | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/industrial-technology/ Fri, 02 Dec 2022 16:24:36 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121856 Leybold is a global leader in the manufacturing of vacuum pumps, systems, and solutions, serving a range of diverse applications in the industrial, food and beverage, and research and development markets with core capabilities focused on customer-specific systems.

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Revenue: Not available
Employees: 1,700

Client Challenge

Leybold’s vacuum technologies serve a diverse range of applications such as food and beverage processing and packaging, advanced medical device systems, and complex R&D projects (e.g., a visionary hyperloop program that will revolutionize transcontinental travel).

Leybold was looking to further its position as a pioneer of vacuum technology and emphasize the value of its expertise that customers weren’t fully appreciating or hadn’t yet recognized a need for. The challenge lay in the complexity of the hundreds of technical applications and the size of the addressable markets. The organization faced the question of how to upskill the sales population to have insight-led conversations that could be scaled across different sectors and stakeholders and move away from being focused solely on product benefits and price.

To do so, the team at Leybold focused on upskilling its multidisciplined team of sales engineers, application engineers, and service support staff to adopt Challenger sales skills. They engaged Challenger, the sales performance specialists, to run a nine-month Challenger training program.

Solution

Challenger helped Leybold by focusing on the four key Challenger skills: teaching for differentiation, tailoring for resonance, taking control, and building constructive tension. The program was broken into four stages over nine months, applying learning and development and change management best practices to drive effective behavioral change.

Stage 1: The leadership teams from sales, product, marketing, and service held a critical awareness day where the program was announced and The Challenger Sale concepts were introduced in detail to set the scene for the stages to follow. The Leadership team attended a “Leading Challenger Change” one-day leadership session to set the vision, objectives, and metrics for the program.

Stage 2: The frontline sales team underwent a six-week pre-workshop preparation phase using the Challenger online portal to ensure sellers would enter the workshops with the right mindset and deals and accounts to work on.

Stage 3: The frontline team, managers, and leaders took part in a two-day “Challenge Yourself” workshop based around four modules: teach, tailor, take control, and constructive tension. Participants applied these concepts to stuck deals and also built commercial teaching messages to have disruptive conversations.

Stage 4: After the workshops, a 90-day application program was launched using online reinforcement tools, teleconferences, and an internally certified trainer to track progress and provide ongoing support.

Results:

Leybold redefined the nature of its conversations, educating customers on processes and technologies that were costing them more money than previously thought.

By changing the way in which they approach customer conversations, Leybold’s customer center in North America was able to drive process improvements in labs and manufacturing facilities by highlighting the underappreciated risks created by overfocusing on cost and resisting the migration to new, innovative technologies. As a result, Leybold not only increased revenue but also turned sales reps into trusted technology advisors.

Three months following the rollout of Challenger, a survey was launched to measure the results

  • Participants attributed $12.5 million in closed and potential contract value to the application of the new skills. 
  • Approximately 80% of participants agreed that Challenger improved their conversations with customers and that customers’ reactions to the different types of conversation were positive.

Quotes

 “Our team has built the skills needed to drive change, present themselves as value-added partners and close larger sales. The Challenger program has given them the confidence and framework to deliver our differentiated expertise at every customer touchpoint.”

Carl Brockmeyer, General Manager, Leybold USA

Quotes

 “Our team has built the skills needed to drive change, present themselves as value-added partners and close larger sales. The Challenger program has given them the confidence and framework to deliver our differentiated expertise at every customer touchpoint.”

Carl Brockmeyer, General Manager, Leybold USA

Before Challenger

  • Leybold offers a wide range of advanced vacuum solutions for use in manufacturing and analytical processes as well as for research purposes. We have an extensive range of vacuum products.

After Challenger

  • Many are not aware that by focusing on reducing expenditure, they are actually wasting millions of dollars in production costs by using outdated vacuum technology. Operating in this manner leads to systems having more downtime, increased inefficiencies, and overall lower performance. A simple ROI analysis is no longer the way to justify new investments.



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Manufacturing | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/foodservice-manufacturing/ Thu, 01 Dec 2022 10:10:06 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success_stories&p=121905 Franke Foodservice Solutions is an industrial manufacturer headquartered in Switzerland. The company is a world-leading supplier of kitchen facilities, equipment, and supply solutions. As a full system manufacturer, distributor, and program management partner, it supplies global chains in the quick-service restaurant, convenience store, and supermarket segments.

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Revenue: ₣3.5B

Employees: 8,130

Client Challenge

Food contamination and prevention of foodborne illnesses was already a high priority within the foodservice industry after several high-profile contaminations caused serious customer illnesses and hurt profits. Franke wanted to seize the opportunity to capitalize on a new product that solved a little-known problem in the industry — contaminated ice, which was causing foodborne illness.

Solution

Franke partnered with Challenger to build a Challenger message and develop seller skills to deliver it effectively. The message targeted a common stakeholder group: operators of fast food/ fast casual restaurants and convenience stores.

Through research, customer knowledge, and a working session on building commercial insights, Franke built a message that brought to the fore an underappreciated cause of a well-known problem and shifted the sales conversation to identifying customer risks rather than product features and benefits.

Results:

Franke increased sales of its continuous ice decontaminating machines by teaching customers that ice is food and thus needs to be treated just as carefully to avoid contamination. By focusing the sales conversation on commercial teaching, Franke was able to unlock and close several large-scale opportunities.

Quotes

 “Challenger switched our approach, giving us the confidence to exit our comfort zone and deliver an edgy, memorable, and effective insight, resulting in a saturation of market education, interest, and sales.”

Luciano Delpozzo, President, Franke Foodservice Solutions

Quotes

 “Challenger switched our approach, giving us the confidence to exit our comfort zone and deliver an edgy, memorable, and effective insight, resulting in a saturation of market education, interest, and sales.”

Luciano Delpozzo, President, Franke Foodservice Solutions

Before Challenger

After Challenger

  • Warmer: Ice is almost everywhere in foodservice — it’s served in almost all water and beverages — and even more so with the industry’s dramatic rise in sales over 10 years of smoothies, blended ice drinks, iced coffee, and so on. At last, consumers are beginning to understand that ice itself is a food — and not just a “thing” that keeps food and drink cold. With that knowledge come higher expectations for the purity of ice.

 

  • Reframe: However, many do not realize how immediately after cleaning, ice machines become recontaminated from microbes in the water, air, ice scoops, buckets, and human hands. Not only does this increase cleaning and service costs, but it also puts customers at significant risk of foodborne illnesses.

 

  • Rational drowning: A study revealed that 33% of ice samples collected and tested exceed the EPA limit set for heterotrophic bacteria concentration in drinking water and that 70.3% of samples tested positive for coliform bacteria. And anyone familiar with the impact of food safety incidents in restaurants can cite the financial risk of liability, and a marketer would point out the impact of negative consumer impressions. Five months after Chipotle’s E. coli outbreak in October 2015, stock prices were still down 34%3. In late 2017, Chipotle is valued at $8 billion—one-third of its value in August 2015 before the first outbreak. 

 

  • Emotional impact: No responsible foodservice operator would ever serve a sandwich on bread that had some mold on it. And he wouldn’t serve ice that came out of a moldy ice machine — if only he regularly looked at the inside of his ice machine. But he doesn’t, and most people in the industry don’t either until the calendar says it’s time to clean the ice machine. By then, countless loads of ice may have been contaminated.

 

  • The operator doesn’t realize he’s serving a beverage product that has odors or off-tastes caused by ice from an unclean machine. Probably he doesn’t see the risk of being exposed as an unclean facility, taking a hit to his reputation and image, and he certainly doesn’t realize he’s at risk of making a customer sick. He can only try to do better at routine cleanings done by staff, which often only spread contamination, and deep cleanings performed by technicians, which are expensive and have only temporary impact. Today’s cleaning methods are not keeping up.

 

  • New way: Many operators are using new sanitation technologies that can keep an ice machine much cleaner through a continuous, in-machine process. They are using it to effectively attack biofilm and slow its recurrence. Such a technology can quickly pay for itself by reducing the cost of deep cleaning and the associated downtime and interruptions plus the maintenance and repair costs caused by biofilm buildup on working parts. Perhaps an even greater benefit is the knowledge that beverage products — a critical source of revenue and profit — are optimized for flavor, purity, and consumer safety.

 

  • Solution: Only Franke can provide you with a long-term solution to continuously decontaminate your ice machine, substantially lengthen the deep-cleaning interval, and protect your customers from ice contamination without the expense and hassle of regular manual cleanings.

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Safety Equipment Manufacturer | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/sales-case-study-safety-equipment-manufacturer-challenger-inc/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 17:23:53 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121558 Arco is the expert in safety and the UK's leading supplier of safety equipment, workwear, safety boots and shoes, gloves and maintenance supplies. As the UK's only integrated services and safety products business, they have a unique mix of expertise and practical real-life industry knowledge to partner with companies in managing workplace health and safety.

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Revenue: £306.7M
Employees: 1,700

Client Challenge

With increasing levels of low-cost competition and customers not seeing the need for premium products, Arco needed to differentiate itself and prove to customers that its expertise in safety and higher quality products was not a ‘nice-to-have’, but a necessity. With low-cost alternatives flooding the market, many customers looked for the cheapest way to buy Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) that still met regulatory standards.

Solution

Challenger helped Arco leverage the value of its premium quality offering, which customers were not fully appreciating. Arco developed messages with data-backed commercial insight that highlighted a powerful and disruptive idea. The safety regulations H&S managers relied on were exposing them to significant risk and these managers had failed to calculate the true cost of inadequate PPE. Arco used this insight to build a Challenger marketing campaign.

This approach shifted their messaging from leading with Arco’s reputation as experts in safety, to instead focus on their customers’ unrecognized risks and urgent need to be working with experts — leading back to Arco’s differentiator and a deeper partnership.

Rather than educating customers on how Arco's products were more thoroughly tested and reliable, the new messaging led with why organizations needed to question the standard of their safety equipment — and the costs of being wrong. They crafted an insight that showed how 40% of certain safety products that claimed to meet industry standards were actually unsafe for employees to use, and how use of them could lead to severe personal injuries and potentially cost the company millions.

Armed with a powerful message, Arco realized they also needed to reach customers earlier in their learning journey, when they first researched online. Using the Challenger Content Strategy framework, Arco disrupted the existing learning journey, which centered around researching product specifications, by educating customers about the unknown risks of safety regulations and their related consequences.

Results:

Through a combination of insightful and strategically placed banner ads, pay-per-click, and email marketing, Arco directed prospects to a specially designed microsite containing an emotionally powerful documentary, an accompanying report and a diagnostic tool enabling prospects to calculate their personal level of risk.

The insightful messaging and Challenger choreographed online learning journey improved Arco’s user engagement and acquisition, and now leads to sales conversations no longer focused on the lowest price. Arco has seen extremely promising results from their Challenger marketing campaign, which they believe are strong leading indicators of future sales success:

  • Achieved 44% higher site visit conversions than the B2B benchmark
  • Higher frequency and quality of leads, sustaining millions in revenue
  • Invited by Government to help shape the future of H&S in the UK
  • Arco’s Challenger marketing campaign also won the International B2B Marketing Award for Thought Leadership

Quotes

“The Challenger messaging and marketing approach has allowed us to engage prospects in a different way, disrupting their current learning journey to better leverage our differentiators, and ultimately generate stronger leads we would not otherwise have attracted.”

Lee Morton Head of Brand & Proposition Development

Quotes

“The Challenger messaging and marketing approach has allowed us to engage prospects in a different way, disrupting their current learning journey to better leverage our differentiators, and ultimately generate stronger leads we would not otherwise have attracted.”

Lee Morton Head of Brand & Proposition Development

Before Challenger

  • “Arco has an extensive range of quality PPE products, a highly ethical supply chain and the UK’s only accredited testing laboratory to ensure our products are the safest around. We are the Experts in Safety.”

After Challenger

  • “Independent lab testing found that 40% of non-metallic footwear and 30% of rigger gloves failed re-testing despite carrying the official CE mark. Simply trusting these markings and choosing these products increases your company’s liability and puts employees at serious risk.”

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Building Materials and Construction Supplier | Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/construction/ Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:25:38 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121312 Metrie is the largest supplier and manufacturer of solid wood and composite moulding in North America, focusing on high-quality interior architectural elements. Facing increased commoditization and customer consolidation, Metrie partnered with Challenger to deploy the Activation Program to a pilot group of sellers targeting key accounts. As a result of the success experienced by the members of the pilot group, Metrie rolled out Challenger to the entire commercial organization less than a year later.

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Revenue: $300M
Employees: 1,500

Client Challenge

Wood and composite moldings are often seen as a commodity. Margin conscious builders are looking for low prices as a way to keep their hard costs down. But if you look more deeply at how moldings are made and distributed, choosing the lowest cost option may not be the best strategy. For Metrie, every detail in their moldings —from sourcing raw materials, to owning their milling capability, to installing and enjoying the finished product —meets the highest standards of quality and is worth paying a premium price.

But the company recently felt twin pressures on its business. On the one hand, outside competitors with a similar product were getting aggressive on price. On the other hand, the Metrie sales force needed market relevant messaging and skills training to provide a more compelling sales experience and justify the value of their premium products. A short-term option for Metrie would be to match the price cuts, but this would benefit no one in the long-term. The better option was to tackle the messaging and skills issues together and use a better sales experience to change the nature of their customer's thinking and buying habits.

Solution

In partnership with Challenger, Metrie built a commercial insight engine that produced sales messaging aimed at teaching builders and distributors about the total value of certain types of molding and showed that purchase price was not always the best datapoint to rely on when deciding. They also trained the sales team in the delivery of this message, centering the conversation on how material price and quality factor into the ultimate cost of a project and how cheaper alternatives end up costing more in the long run. This message led to, not with, the benefits of Metrie's solution.After rolling out theinsight and training salespeople to deliver it, they also provided coaching, tools, and application support so that sellers could practice and truly embed these new behaviors in their workflow.

Results

Metrie has seen a measurable increase in value provided to customers when delivering this new sales experience. Although builders have agreed to a small increase in materials cost, this has translated into finely crafted, higher quality architectural elements and an improved aesthetic design, resulting in greater value and satisfaction to homeowners. This has in turn improved Metrie's success in important commercial metrics, prompting further investment in the program across the entire commercial organization year over year.

  • Increased sales leading to a 28x return on 2021 Challenger investment
  • 94% of sellers report they are provided the necessary support to embed Challenger into their day-to-day workflow
  • 96% of sellers prepare more thoroughly for sales interactions and feel that Challenger
    Activation is a worthwhile investment of their time
  • 71% of opportunities brought to the workshop have closed or progressed
  • 94% of sellers would recommend Challenger Activation to their peers

Quotes

“I have worked in this industry for 20 years. As a salesman, meeting the customers needs has always been my focus. Challenger has taught me to look at business in new ways, to discover pain points that customers have, and most importantly to look for every opportunity to teach and tailor messages for the different stakeholders.“ – David Douglas, Territory Manager

“Better preparation coupled with curiosity about real customer needs has made my time with customers more beneficial for them and has strengthened our business relationships.” Sean Greenhill, Key Account Manager

“I believe many of our recently acquired Challenger skills have helped me achieve success. As I began to deepen the pain with the customer in regards to their current supplier and process, I really started to notice the light bulbs going off in the customer’s head.” Tim Fowler, Key Account manager

Quotes

“I have worked in this industry for 20 years. As a salesman, meeting the customers needs has always been my focus. Challenger has taught me to look at business in new ways, to discover pain points that customers have, and most importantly to look for every opportunity to teach and tailor messages for the different stakeholders.“ – David Douglas, Territory Manager

“Better preparation coupled with curiosity about real customer needs has made my time with customers more beneficial for them and has strengthened our business relationships.” Sean Greenhill, Key Account Manager

“I believe many of our recently acquired Challenger skills have helped me achieve success. As I began to deepen the pain with the customer in regards to their current supplier and process, I really started to notice the light bulbs going off in the customer’s head.” Tim Fowler, Key Account manager

Before Challenger

  • Could be months or years to land a new supporting dealer or convert a builder to one of their product lines.
  • No formal sales model or training in place
  • Unstructured process for planning and executing sales calls

After Challenger

  • A common approach to the sales experience centered on providing insight
  • Greater engagement with builders and distributors
  • Better preparation and execution of sales calls
  • 87% of sellers prepare more thoroughly for sales interactions
  • Stronger goal attainment across the team ($6.96 million of new closed opportunities)

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Manufacturing Sales Training https://challengerinc.com/success-stories/manufacturing-sales-training/ Tue, 22 Nov 2022 16:00:52 +0000 https://challengerinc.com/?post_type=success-stories&p=121070 With over 7,000 employees and $1B in annual revenue, this manufacturing giant in residential and commercial spaces expanded into monitoring and management technology to increase revenue streams.

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Revenue: $1B
Employees: 7,000

Client Challenge

A market leader of essential building materials created easy-to-integrate SaaS offerings to drive growth beyond its core product. Despite vigorous market testing, the company struggled to get distributor representatives and end-users to purchase the new catalog of subscription-based services. When growth stalled, the company turned to Challenger for a strategy that emphasized the undesirable costs of the status quo and propelled adoption of new technology to increase sales.

Solution

Examining sales data and dashboards, Challenger quickly pinpointed specific ways company representatives and distributors failed to drive customers to new offerings.

Issues to overcome included: (1) Customers’ inability to see urgency and value in the SaaS technology and view it as a solution and (2) Sellers who featured products rather than the pain those products eliminated.

Results

Challenger provided bold commercial insight and trained teams to reframe the sales conversation and refocus its value proposition. In three months, sellers consistently delivered Challenger-driven conversations and performed significantly better in achieving new product targets.

Sales refresh in 3 steps

Challenger identified teams in need of tailored training: (1) those engaging with dealer representatives and (2) groups interacting with end-users.

Challenger coached groups to reframe sales conversations and integrate revitalized messaging. Teams prepared sales scenarios and well-scripted responses.

To ensure the adoption of Challenger-inspired skills and messaging, teams reconvened for deal accelerators that reinforced new behaviors.

Sales refresh in 3 steps

Challenger identified teams in need of tailored training: (1) those engaging with dealer representatives and (2) groups interacting with end-users.

Challenger coached groups to reframe sales conversations and integrate revitalized messaging. Teams prepared sales scenarios and well-scripted responses.

To ensure the adoption of Challenger-inspired skills and messaging, teams reconvened for deal accelerators that reinforced new behaviors.

Winning Sales Teams Now

  • Overcome risk aversion and create urgency
  • Reframe the value proposition
  • Emphasize pain eliminated 
  • Encourage adoption of new SaaS-based technology

Launched to Success

Challenger-trained sales reps improve outcomes by incorporating constructive tension to successfully expand the customer’s way of thinking.

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