Pindar is a company that has grown from being a printer to being "a supplier of visual communications". Indeed they were one of the first printing companies to embrace and harness the power of electronic publishing and the world wide web to expand the range of services they offered.

The company's growth required a dramatic reappraisal of the behaviour of the sales team in particular. The change from concentrating on selling space on print machines to selling the company's ability to design and provide complete solutions was a major paradigm shift.

After a thorough consultation, a Sales Development Programme was designed with Pindar to address the issues. The programme started with a further consultation process to establish a competency framework, which was rolled out on the first workshop. Salespeople were introduced to the framework, invited to comment, then assessed themselves against it to identify individual learning objectives. We then delivered a series of workshops to help them achieve and consolidate these objectives.

Workshops were presented covering:

1. Introduction to Selling

This highly interactive workshop was an introduction to and revision of some of the basic selling theories to confirm levels of knowledge and understanding. Delegates considered why people buy, AIDA, professional selling skills and a structured approach to a sale. We explored how and why selling models have developed over the years and how they applied to their own experiences.

2. Consultative Selling

This was the backbone of the programme, where the necessity and effectiveness of a new approach were explored. On day one, everyone completed the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, learning to better understand and appreciate different "types". They began practising how to flex their behaviour to better understand and work with clients. They considered how they communicated and how to use better questioning strategies.

3. Negotiation Skills

A critical aspect of the new approach was how to negotiate with customers and to move away from dependence on best price. This was again highly interactive with feedback on practical simulations an initially daunting, but well received aspect of the workshop.

4. Key Account Management

Assessing themselves against Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was an interesting introduction to the broader aspects of defining, nurturing and building key accounts. The KAM process and its relevance to Pindar business was considered and then applied to their own accounts. Understanding supplier positioning models and defining Key Account selection criteria gave them a deeper appreciation of the company's strategy. This allowed the salespeople to go away with some very clear action points - both in terms of their own self-management and of better managing their customers. 

This was followed up six months later with a review workshop, where the key messages were looked at again with the benefit of experience and everyone assessed their progress and made commitments to maintain the considerable momentum they felt they had achieved.

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