Case studies

Heber - Technical teams contribute to the new business goals.

Background
Heber Ltd has for over 30 years specialised in the design and manufacture of real-time electronic control systems. The company has a strong presence in the gaming market but to diversify, they have been successfully building up a strong customer base in two new areas: security and white goods. With the sales teams busy finding new customers, the Directors wanted the engineering team, ops manager, buyers and sales order processor to build on their already strong and close customer relationships to ensure new opportunities were spotted and further projects continually signed up.

Objectives
For the engineers, operations manager, buyer and internal sales staff to recognise the contribution they could make to the company's business goals and to be gaining new sales opportunities themselves.

Actions
One to one coaching sessions with all those involved taught Ann about individual roles, their personal experiences of building long-term customer relationships, where they were starting from and what each of them wanted to get out of the training. Ann then designed 2 bespoke sales training workshops with topics carefully chosen to match the specific needs of the individuals and the business. Topics included why it was important to proactively seek opportunities, how this fitted into existing roles, what sort of opportunities they were being asked to find and how to do it. Skills covered included questioning, listening, starting conversations, putting themselves in the customer's shoes, and being focused on how they could help their customers and their businesses. Using scenarios that had come up in the coaching sessions, the participants looked at how to put this learning into practice and left the workshop with their own carefully considered action plans in place.

In order to ensure that new habits stuck and behaviours changed in the long term, one to one follow-up coaching calls took place 6 weeks after the workshop.

Results
"Thanks to Ann's training, we have seen new opportunities and new sales with our existing customers. Her training delivered the results that we were looking for, and has had a positive impact on the business"

Les Ashton Smith - MD, Heber Ltd.

<<back next>>