Daimler Trucks North America needed to develop a consistent selling process to identify needs, qualify prospects, and convert new, telephone-based inquiries to sales center visits.
Janek’s team visited sales centers, worked in the field, analyzed recorded class, and interviewed all levels of the sales team to learn Daimler’s industry, network, and business model. This discovery culminated in a customized teleselling training workshop designed to meet the client’s objectives.
About Daimler Trucks North America
Daimler Trucks North America is a Portland (OR)-based manufacturer of commercial vehicles with over 34,000 employees. They are a wholly owned subsidiary of Daimler AG and have been in operation for almost 80 years.
The company is also home to many prestige brands, including Alliance Parts, Detroit Diesel, Freightliner Trucks, Thomas Built Buses, and Western Star Trucks. Among Daimler’s focuses are innovating in 21st century vehicular trends such as electric-fueled products and automated trucking technology.
The Challenge
The industrial equipment industry was in a historic sales volume swoon. Used truck values, demand, and sales opportunities were all falling. Daimler identified the point of first contact – a prospect calling the sales center for information – as a key event in the sales process.
The company also recognized that calls needed to shift from their current Q&A dialogue to a brief, consultative conversation where sales reps gained understanding of prospect needs, qualified callers, and presented value to prospects.
The Solution
Upon being selected to deliver sales training, Janek conducted a deep dive into Daimler’s industry, network, and business model via sales center visits, field work, recorded calls analysis, and interviews with every level of the sales team.
Concurrent to this investigative process, Janek was able to achieve buy-in from sales management and inside sales reps via Managing Partner Nick Kane’s administration of several breakout sessions at Daimler’s annual leadership conference. These sessions provided an opportunity to detail Janek’s rationale on sales evolution and describe program specifics – including shifting inbound telephone interactions from product-based to consultative – with resulting increased opportunities and marketing ROI.
Janek’s Instructional Design Team collaborated with Daimler to develop a customized Critical TeleSelling Skills workshop that was then rolled out to the entire network at two centralized locations over a three-week period. Class sizes were capped at 20 participants per session to ensure significant interactions, role-plays, and case practices for each attendee.
The project also included developing and delivering formal coaching tools to Daimler’s Sales Center Managers to support ongoing coaching and reinforcement of learned skills. These tools were deployed virtually via a series of webinars held jointly by Janek and Daimler leadership.
The Results
Janek’s Critical TeleSelling Skills workshop proved successful as Daimler saw higher retention rates of skills taught than previous types of sales training. Furthermore, the workshop was so impactful that the curriculum was incorporated into Daimler’s onboarding process for new sales hires.
Post-Training Results
601
%
84%
%
75
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