GDA's Epiphany™ ...Continuous Sales Best Practices

Your company makes the necessary investments each year in providing your sales force with the skills, methodologies, and sales tools needed to establish or maintain a competitive advantage, but…

• Do your people practice these skills and methodologies after the class has concluded?
• Does each sales person and sales manager know what is actually working in the field?
• Are best practices and breakthrough success stories shared to maximum advantage?

Announcing: Epiphany™– GDA’s Field Sales Skills Tuning Program featuring Continuous Sales Best Practices.

Whether you have taken advantage of Growth Development Associate Inc.'s (GDA) world class sales and marketing training curriculum, utilized services provided by another supplier, or created your own in-house training program, your investment is too important not to follow-up to determine the results. GDA uses a 55point Quality Assurance Process to sample your field force every day for successful best practices, describe those successes, identify the repeatable skills, and distribute the results (along with a manager’s coaching guide) weekly to the entire field. Epiphany’s Continuous Sales Best Practices offering includes:

1. Daily Field Sampling of field sales personnel to identify specific examples of sales skills and behaviors that are actually working to achieve results in the field.
2. A highly effective “Weekly Journal” (Epiphany) that will feature success stories, references, and skills reinforcement in a subtle, non-intrusive format suitable for bulletin boards, electronic bulletin boards, web sites, staff room walls, newsletters, email broadcasts, Epiphany Notebooks, and management coaching sessions.
3. A weekly Manager’s Coaching Guide that enables managers to highlight the skills and behaviors of each Epiphany to help the rest of the field learn and emulate those successes.
4. A Continuously Tuned Sales Force that takes the training seriously, because the content is reviewed, post class behaviors are inspected, and success stories are shared.
5. An effective Return on Investment Assessment analysis to determine the value of training and provide input to future training decisions.

Epiphany™ is an annually renewable program offering continuous field sampling, success summaries, skills tuning, management sales skills reinforcement, and a comprehensive ROI analysis of skills development.

Call GDA at 800-966-4321 to learn more about Epiphany™ – Continuous Sales Best Practices.

Epiphany™ can be combined with Mentor™ - GDA’s new Management Coaching program featuring Continuous Management Best Practices.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. We’re already doing training. All the more reason to take advantage of Epiphany. You’ve already invested hundreds of thousands in training, facilities, airfare, hotels and meals to train your people. Yet, most companies provide little in the way of daily or weekly practice once the training is over. Even management struggles to find the time or the expertise to reinforce training. Most people agree that within days of getting back to the field, training concepts can fade and people can return to old habits. Training is only good if it sticks, and nothing helps training stick like reinforcement.
2. How will this work with my existing training? We’ll incorporate the key concepts of your existing and planned training into the stories we look for when we talk with your sales people. We’ll add elements from GDA training that are compatible with your training programs to refresh and expand on the concepts.
3. Will this be a burden to my sales force? No burden at all. Our sampling will rotate among people in the field. With a 500 person sales force, for example, no one would receive a call from our consultants more than twice during the year.
4. Will the participants interviewed get feedback or coaching from GDA? You bet. We’ll listen to the encounter that the sales person had and help them recognize the skills that helped them to be successful. We’ll reinforce the skills that were done well and coach them on areas that could be improved.
5. What if there are no good stories to be shared? There are always lessons to be shared from sales calls. The entire field will know that they are invited to email success stories whenever they occur. In addition, GDA consultants will sample the field directly. All GDA consultants have sales and sales management experience. We’ll make calls until we find a story that can be replicated to help the field. If we should find that no one is having any success, we’ll explore sales calls that failed to find the points of difficulty and create a story from what was learned in the miss. Most sales managers agree that we can learn as much from reviewing our wins as we can from reviewing our misses.
6. Can we have emphasis on key products, competitors or skills? Absolutely. You can share any area of emphasis with GDA, and our consultants will test for and discuss these areas when we sample the field for success stories. We will develop Epiphanies to highlight these strategic areas of your company’s focus.
7. What assurances can you give me that this will work? Sales people have absolute credibility with each other. Because the Epiphanies are based on real stories from their peers, even the disbelievers will become interested and motivated to try what is being reported. Because the Epiphanies come every week, the continuous reinforcement will help maintain a constant awareness of improvement and the keys to proven successes.
8. Why shouldn’t we just do it ourselves? Perhaps every company should be doing this, but in fact almost no one has the time. Your people are running hard to keep up with their day to day work, and it is not likely that they would find the time to daily inspect the field and create compelling success stories to share. You would need sales trainers to best highlight the skills reflected, and you would need sales managers to capture the management coaching components. GDA consultants have all been sales people, sales managers and sales trainers… and this is what we do as professionals. Moreover, GDA has developed a proprietary, 55point Quality Assurance Process to assure that every Epiphany is complete, effective and focused on repeatable, successful behavior.
9. Do you have the resources to handle our large size? Absolutely. Because GDA is dedicated to sales and management training, our consultants have the time and focus required to discover and present sales successes in a skills building format.
10. How do we get started? As soon as we have your agreement, GDA will meet with members of your sales training and sales management teams to understand the key skills you want reinforced through your Epiphany program. We will require email and telephone numbers of the field workforce to be interviewed, and we can begin your program within two weeks. From that date, we’ll deliver a weekly Epiphany, complete with field input, highlighted sales skills, and a manager coaching guide for the next fifty-two weeks.
11. How will you measure results? GDA will survey the sales force after every six months to measure the impact of their actual results in five categories. 
    
    

    Closed sales Average size of sales Length of sales cycle

    Discounting & profitability New pipeline identified

12. Who owns the Epiphany stories and coaching summaries? All Epiphany stories and manager guides become the property of the client.