CASE 9.3: TRAINING AND EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

Med Solutia is a national provider of outpatient nursing. After experiencing a four-year growth trend through organic growth and acquisitions, Med Solutia has seen a downward trend in performance. The Vice President of Sales, Delhia Ross, believes that the sales personnel lack a cohesive strategy and that many of the new representatives obtained through acquisitions use outdated techniques in their sales process. Her own employees who helped drive the organic growth that Med Solutia enjoyed could use some additional training since Med Solutia does not offer a consistent training program. Delhia wants to get a sales training program installed to get all representatives working from the same toolbox.

Individual sales representatives brought their own methodologies and strategies for approaching sales opportunities. It became painfully obvious to Med Solutia that the larger sales team suffered from a lack of formalized training and the absence of a consistent, organization-wide sales methodology. They acted more like customer service representatives than proactive sales professionals.

Delhia calls a training consultant firm, Higher Ground, to help her develop a training program. Given her experience, she wants to offer a training program that trains in SPIN Selling, value selling, appropriately handling objections, sales strategy, and key account management. Tim Jones, Chief Training Officer for Higher Ground, cautions Delhia against deciding on the training topics without first doing some analysis. Higher ground promotes the use of the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) process from Six Sigma problem-solving to generate and execute a training plan.

Tim starts by getting small groups of fewer than eight sales representatives in a room at a time and mapping out the current sales processes that they use. As they map out these processes, they assign areas in which they need improvement. Concurrently, Penelope Lopez, E-Business Coordinator for Higher Ground, generates online questionnaires to send to all of Med Solutias customers. The goal of these questionnaires is to get customer opinions on the sales methods used by Med Solutia. Tim also has some of his data analysts work on evaluating the performance metrics available for each sales associate and linking the metrics to salesperson methods.

Upon completing the analysis, Higher Ground put together a training program that would have every sales associate attend training quarterly on different topics as identified through the analyses. Each training session would be followed up with some practical exercises to ensure understanding of the subject matter and formal supervisory evaluation to ensure that the new training was being used in the field. As well, the regular customer surveys were to be modified to measure the success of the training program.

In order to control the quality of future training, Higher Ground would train a team of mid-level managers on how to perform future evaluations of the process to trigger more updates to the program. Delhia was happy with the solution proposed by Higher Ground and decided to submit a purchase order for its services.

Case Questions - please answer these questions, NO COPIED ANSWERS PLEASE. I WILL GIVE YOU THUMB UP!!

1. Do you agree with the Higher Ground approach to training, and if so, why?

2. Besides basic value added sales training, what training needs do you think organizations like Med Solutia face that are typically ignored?

3. What other uses for the DMAIC process can you think of in a sales-driven organization?

4. Could Delhia have implemented the sales training program without the help of external resources? Why would a company choose to hire a consultant to drive organizational change as against creating the change using internal and experienced personnel?

5. Who should be the driving force behind the design and development of training programs within organizations, and why?

6. How can management personnel motivate employees to learn from training and apply lessons learned in the workplace?

7. How can companies motivate employees to take the initiative and obtain job-related training on their own?