Sales coaching helps engineering specialist to stay on top

Article Type: Notes and news From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 45, Issue 4

Specialist engineering firm Festo tailored a training program for its UK sales force, introducing a major cultural shift through coaching-based training, which kept revenues up in a sluggish market.

The manufacturing and engineering firm’s principal activity is the import and sale of pneumatic and fluid power and automation-based products and control systems to manufacturing and engineering firms. However, Festo is best known for its flying penguins, which flew at the Royal Festival of Science’s 350th anniversary and featured on The Gadget Show on television.

Recognizing the need to increase its competitiveness, the company introduced an international training initiative, named Fit for Change, for its sales teams. However, the UK program failed, receiving a lukewarm reception from the sales team after the first module was introduced. This was compounded when the master trainer, who was the head of national sales, left the UK business.

The British management team went back to basics, taking decisive action to restart the learning but with a redesigned program. “We believed in the strategic thinking behind the program, recognizing that people needed to engage differently with customers, but we knew it needed to be tailored to the specific needs in the UK,” said Simon Fletcher, marketing consultant.

The redesigned Fit for Change initiative was based on a train-the-trainer model,where master trainers cascade their learning to local trainers, typically sales managers, regional managers or directors.

The program has five modules: sales and advanced sales skills for Festo engineers (modules one and two); handling various behavior styles of customers;fundamental negotiation skills; and introduction and foundations of team selling.

Festo’s new sales manager offered a fresh perspective on the business value of the program, and the sales-management team realized it needed to be more involved in Fit for Change so it could contribute to increased productivity.

Coaching was identified as the best solution to keep the program alive and ensure it could deliver and sustain the desired performance results.

Senior management invested time to work alongside sales managers, to ensure they received a good balance between operational responsibilities and coaching time. The business introduced a coaching forum that meets regularly to exchange experiences, ideas and approaches to effective coaching.

Sales consultants receive a minimum of 10 coaching days a year, and line managers deliver all coaching internally. For sales managers, more than a third of their working year is dedicated to coaching their team.

Deputy national sales manager Marc Wellington said: “My coaching means the team members can practice and reflect on their core skill set. I easily spend over three quarters of my time coaching. Coaching themes are generally defined by those I am coaching and I get regular feedback and supervision from the national sales manager to ensure my intervention is delivering results for the coaches and the business.”

Fit for Change has now been running for ten years at Festo, and its coaching-based approach has been an essential contributor to the company’s success, enabling it to increase its market share by over 30 percent, operating in a market that has declined by approximately 35 percent over the last decade. In the latest Fit for Change employee survey, the vast majority confirmed that the coaching directly improved their business results through new customer acquisitions and increased business levels.

The program was a National Training Awards winner.

Gary Wyles, Festo’s managing director, concluded: “Back in the late 1990 s we recognized that the traditional ways of selling to customers and communicating with colleagues were not sufficient to deliver this vision, and over the last 10-plus years Festo has undertaken a journey to develop a more consultative and company team-based approach to understanding our customers’requirements.

“The journey has not been easy and has not been without setbacks. We wanted these skills to become habits for all individuals, not just a theory that was covered in a training course and then forgotten. We chose a coaching program to embed these new skills throughout the organization. The result is that Festo has been consistently outperforming its competitors in recent years, growing market share year after year.”