The Furniture Practice: Making Rain in Clerkenwell
“Our objective was to have our key sales people create more selling activity and close more business. The biggest impact Russell has made is clarity around authentic selling and flexing our styles to suit the context of the pitch and creating rapport.”
Nancy Wilde, Director
The Furniture Practice is an ambitious, highly successful, innovative furniture company which has excellent long-standing relationships with clients and manufacturers alike. For 20 years the company has offered a truly objective, design-led service from consultation to installation and aftercare.
After three months the data around both improvements in skills levels and contracts won was impressive: 29% group average improvement in their business development performance and £1.35million of additional sales (on a £20million turnover) were reported by the group as a direct result of having undertaken the Rainmaker development.
The initial discussion with the principals of The Furniture Practice was around pitching skills. However, it became apparent during the meeting that there was a broader need for business development capabilities: to take talented, creative account managers and give them the skills and motivation to grow the business. This led to a targeted and intensive programme proposal for a smaller group of senior account managers.
To turn them into Rainmakers.
With ambitious growth plans there would of course be a need eventually to be better in the more formal pitch, but more important was the ability to spot opportunities, generate more leads, go out and forge new relationships and effectively leverage off existing ones.
The Rainmaker programme delivers just that. It is all about business growth and eight account managers were signed up for the six-month journey, with an extensive pre-programme assessment, three day immersive event, post programme analysis and regular Business Growth Workshops.
This event is the starting point and kicks off the six -month journey, creating the momentum that is vital. Attitude and Approach is addressed first, followed by a focus on the value proposition though the emotional connection and finally advancing the relationship when in the room.
Delegate feedback from the event included:
After the immediate ‘high’ and potential ‘quick wins’ from attending the Rainmaker Event, preventing application of the learning dropping off requires ongoing support to keep generating forward momentum. This is due to what psychologists call the ‘forgetting curve’ i.e. the fact that people forget what they’ve learned over a period of time and need both refreshers to aid memory and motivation to aid application.
To keep driving the momentum and results, we worked closely with the client to tailor their Business Growth Workshops which were an essential component of the programme as they:
Director Nancy Wilde sat in on the second business growth workshop and gained valuable insight into what the programme was delivering, as well as where the delegates were on their journey.
At the end of the day sales solve everything and the expectation was that after the programme sales numbers would be demonstrably higher and so it has proved. This is Kirkpatrick Level Four; improving the bottom line.
Every delegate on the programme would recommend it to others as a way of enhancing their selling capabilities.
Here are some hard numbers at the three-month stage of the journey:
in sales reported as a direct result of Rainmaker Programme
performance improvement
and skills learned applied directly to their role
in spotting sales opportunities…
in ongoing client relationships …
and growing the business
in becoming a trusted advisor.
Skills levels at Kirkpatrick level four, making a difference to the business, are measured across a range of qualitative metrics.
The key areas where delegates indicated improvement were:
keep asking questions rather then go in for the sell
seeing opportunities for the entire business not just myself
for business development
of what type of salesperson I am
with our key strategic partners
being interested in topics I don’t typically read/talk about.
Our objective in working with KWC was to have our key sales people create more selling activity and close more business.
The biggest impact KWC has made to our sales team is clarity around authentic selling – who we are as sales people, flexing our styles to suit the context of the pitch and creating rapport.
As a result of the training our attitude towards business development has become more proactive with a greater understanding of how to steer a business development meeting and improved confidence in questioning techniques, that shift the focus toward the value proposition.
The course has given us an opportunity to reflect on business development practice whilst reminding us of the importance of new business development activity and to more acutely identify potential opportunities.
