It’s extremely rare that you get the opportunity to undertake a needs

It’s extremely rare that you get the opportunity to undertake a needs assessment, design, deliver and then measure training to the “business impact” level. We started that process at a Swiss based B2B company and finished 12 months later with some interesting results. They generated in excess of €1.5 million of business.

The nature of the company’s industry is such that there are an extremely small number of clients, all of whom were already known to them.  Unsurprisingly given the business dynamics, the needs assessment, which comprised an on-line survey, telephone interviews and face-to-face meetings with Senior Managers, revealed a need to improve people’s ability to negotiate in order to i) improve margins and ii) grow share of client.

The content was designed in a highly bespoke manner and then sent to participants prior to the actual training.  Why? Given the cost of bringing people together, there was a strong need to maximise the classroom time, so participants had to familiarise themselves with the core concepts and thus be ready to apply them early in the training.  We used live client scenarios for discussions and skills training and also invited one of the company’s biggest clients to present the buyer’s perspective and undertake a Q&A.  The learning, workplace application and business impact was measured at four and eight months and Line Managers developed Learning Application Plans for each participant which in turn were tied to individual PDP’s.

Twelve months later:

100% of the participants were using the negotiation ideas and concepts in the workplace either weekly or monthly.
100% of the participants felt that they had tangibly improved their negotiation skills.
100% of the participants felt more confident about negotiating.
91% of the participants said that they had used the negotiation ideas and concepts to either secure business or resolve internal matters.
Tangible business generated using the negotiation ideas and concepts – €1,575,000.