The National Training Awards 2010

Entries for the National Training Awards have just closed and Natural Training has made a submission in the Training Providers category endorsed by our client EMC.
Natural Training’s Founder Matt Drought is hopeful that the sales opportunities that were generated for EMC will be recognised by the awards committee.

EMC, the world leader in information infrastructure solutions, made the decision to work with Natural Training as part of its ongoing drive to bring ever-greater value and strategic engagement to its customers and partners. The company was determined to thrive – and intensify its laser-focus on customer service – during the downturn, and its UK management moved proactively to augment its Inside Sales team and Channel Partners with new skills and approaches to address the market’s unique challenges.

The target of the training was to increase the level of customer and prospect engagement and – by the same token – use the increase in proactive and outbound sales efforts to measurably grow EMC’s pipeline of opportunity.

Natural Training devised a concept called Natural LIVE, tailored to EMC’s business, which had a very simple premise. Training was bite-sized and relevant, with no more than 25 to 40 minutes in the training room, followed by 60 to 90 minutes on the phones.

During phone sessions the coaches spent time with salespeople to ensure their personal needs were covered. Four or five call sessions and the same amount of training sessions were planned in one day, and the ratio was one trainer to eight EMC trainees.

Natural Training and EMC worked out a way to make outbound calling effective & enjoyable while hitting targets. Satisfaction surveys at the end of each day of training demonstrated that 85% of participants rated the training as either “Very Good” or “Excellent”.

The Natural LIVE project commenced in October 2008. There were 35 separate training days in 15 locations around the UK and Ireland. During the subsequent 12 months, 377 people were trained.

That’s a great story on its own.

However the most dramatic result of the training was the rapid acceleration past the project’s initial targets. The training’s focus on cold-calling skills helped to produce a higher number of potential sales leads across the organisation and the opportunity to break in to new accounts.

Charlotte Campbell, Director, Sales Skills EMEA at EMC, says, ” The success of the programme was due to a mixture of the energy NT brought to the day, combined with some of their fresh sales training ideas.”

“Natural Training helped us to develop new selling behaviours, including the use of voice tone, energy, desire, getting past gatekeepers, leaving voice mails, messaging skills, asking better questions and handling objections. As a result, the teams became more persuasive and influential.”

Concludes Campbell: “More importantly NT was able to truly partner with EMC through flexing their approach to meet our business needs. This is a key requirement for us when we make a decision to work with an external provider.”

Update – WE WON. Read more here…