In today’s fiercely competitive business environment, B-side companies often face many problems when choosing sales training, such as how to judge whether a training institution is reliable and how to avoid training that looks good but is not practical.
In the fall of 2021, Siemens Industrial Automation Division was also in such a dilemma.
Siemens Industrial Automation Division has been deeply involved in the Chinese market for many years. Its customers cover many core industries and its sales teams are spread across the country.
They originally received sales training through Siemens Management School, with lectures by experts from the European headquarters and mature sales methodologies, but these contents were out of touch with the Chinese market.
The sales logic of European experts is applicable to the European and American markets, but it is “acclimated” to the Chinese market.
For example, European experts emphasize finding the person in charge of procurement and clearly explaining the product advantages. However, in the Chinese market, if the technical department does not approve after the person in charge of procurement nods, the project may still fail; European experts emphasize professional presentation and data speak for themselves, while Chinese customers pay more attention to whether the sales person understands the business and can solve practical problems; the competition strategy of European experts based on standardized markets will not be effective when encountering opponents with more flexible and aggressive tactics in the Chinese market.
The head of the marketing department learned online that Zhuohan Consulting focuses on ToB sales training, and decided to conduct a small-scale training pilot first.
After Zhuohan Consulting received the demand, it did not rush to sell courses, but first had an in-depth understanding of Siemens’ business.
Through multiple rounds of communication with the marketing department and sales management, they found that although the training targets were regional managers, they would eventually be copied to front-line sales. Therefore, the training content should focus on the core abilities most needed by front-line sales, such as communicating with customers, exploring needs, and promoting transactions.
Based on this, the training topic of consultative selling skills was determined.
At the end of 2021, a pilot training was held in Kunming, with participants including regional managers and front-line sales backbones.
After the training, the feedback exceeded expectations. The trainees said that the content was highly practical and highly consistent with daily work scenarios.
This pilot allowed Siemens to verify Zhuohan Consulting’s capabilities, and Zhuohan Consulting was subsequently introduced into Siemens’ official supplier system.
In the next three years, the two parties carried out a systematic and stepped sales training system.
In the first year, a national rotation of consultative sales training was carried out. The content was customized and adjusted. Actual case studies were added, demand mining methods were optimized, and competitor response strategies were added. The training effect was remarkable, and salespeople reported that communication with customers was more directional.
In the second year, I designed key account sales strategy training. Based on the complex characteristics of key account projects, I taught advanced strategies such as how to make relationship maps and identify key decision makers.
In the third year, challenge sales training is introduced, and a localized version is designed based on Siemens business scenarios to enhance the business thinking level of sales elites and managers.
From this cooperation, we can get three insights.
First of all, pilots are an effective way to verify training institutions. Enterprises should pay attention to indicators such as whether the training institution has researched the business in advance, whether the lecturers have practical experience in the industry, whether the training content has specific tools and methods, whether the student feedback is practical, and whether subsequent implementation support is provided.
Secondly, localization is not just a simple “down-to-earth approach”, but also requires understanding the decision-making logic of Chinese customers, adapting to the market competition environment, and adapting to the front-line sales dilemma.
Finally, the training system should be layered to provide different training contents according to different levels of the sales team, such as basic abilities, advanced strategies and top thinking training, and the interval between layered training should be 6 to 12 months.
If your company is also facing problems such as the existing training system is not implemented, it is difficult to identify training institutions, you want to build a hierarchical training system, or there are bottlenecks in improving front-line sales capabilities, you may wish to learn from Siemens’ approach and conduct a small-scale pilot first to verify whether the training institution really understands your business.
