Viacom Cable Proves Sales Training Works
How do you measure sales training?
Viacom Cable launched a training program for its sales and customer service reps two years ago, and the results are measurable and impressive.
“We really outperformed the industry in selling premium services like HBO and Showtime,” said Virgina Westphal, Viacom’s vice president of marketing, sales and programming.
In 1990, the cable industry grew by 350,000 premium units. Viacom, America’s 10th largest cable company, sold a staggering 25% of these premium units.
The Payoff
As additional proof of the success of its sales training, Viacom points to its premium sell-in-rate, a ratio that tells how many new customers buy a premium service. Premium services cost cable customers an additional fee each month.
At the beginning of 1990, 44% of Viacom’s new customers subscribed to a premium service. By mid-1991, this number had jumped 15 percentage points to 60%.
“This has had a huge impact on our business,” explained Rusty Weekes, Viacom’s national sales director. “If a customer subscribes to a premium service he gets a converter box. We can then sell him a whole range of other services over the telephone without ever having to send a salesperson to the door or roll a truck.”
“Plus we find our premium customers are more satisfied over all and keep our services longer. So, we don’t lose them and have to reinvest in re-selling them.”
The training hasn’t just improved sales. Because supervisors and managers are accountable for implementing and maintaining the program, Viacom has developed future leaders as well.
According to Weekes, “It’s given our people the skills to be leaders, and helped us identify the skills we need in managers.”
How Did It Happen?
“In the past, Viacom grew because we acquired new systems and built into new areas,” Westphal explained. “Those customers were easy to sell – they called us and all we had to do was take the order. But it gets tough when you have to grow by increasing the number of services each customer buys. You aren’t order-takers any more. You have to sell.”
In 1987, Westphal took a long, hard look at Viacom’s sales performance. “I observed a real lack of skills, and no consistent way to train people in these skills. Also, very few people in the organization thought they were responsible for sales.”
She seized the opportunity to sell her company on a comprehensive sales development program. “With the number of transactions we have, we only needed a small improvement to justify the investment.”
Westphal and a committee of managers picked Kris Schaeffer & Associates (KS&A) to design and deliver a total sales training system.
Key Training Goals
KS&A worked with Viacom to identify the training goals. The program had to:
Be customized to reflect the entire cable product line.
Be applicable to a variety of sales environments, such as direct sales, inbound telephone sales, and employees who take telephone orders.
Be implemented in the field by supervisors who were responsible for teaching, monitoring and coaching their front-line employees.
Include training for supervisors.
Include methods for sustaining the learning by providing employees with self-study programs and knowledge tests.
With this mandate, KS&A researched, designed, and developed five training programs:
A two-day basic skills course for all customer contact personnel
Four one-day workshops in using the skills in different sales environments — door-to-door sales, outbound sales, inbound telephone sales, and cross-selling
A three-day trainer training program
A two-day coaching program
A self-study program for supervisors in how to monitor calls
Supervisor Involvement Critical
To make sales a part of everyone’s job, Viacom asked supervisors to take responsibility for implementing the program.
“We had to reply on non-trainers” Weekes said, “but the tradeoff was worth it. Those who were accountable for the sales performance of their people were now responsible for providing the skills needed to do the job.”
This also provided great flexibility and cost-savings. Supervisors can teach new employees immediately. Breaking the workshops into in shorter segments helped to meet scheduling demands. There were no travel costs to send trainers to participants, or participants to trainers.
The more they taught the course, the more supervisors mastered the skills. It was amazing to see supervisors become the go-to coach to help employees overcome objections or learn how to sell in new programs or products.
Ingredients for Success
After the first year of sales training roll-out, Viacom began to compile their formula for selling success. They learned to:
• Require basic selling skills training for all customer contact employees
• Require job-specific sales training for each function
• Put supervisors in the role of trainers and coaches
• Give supervisors training in train-the-trainer, coaching, and monitoring
• Set sales goals for all supervisors and managers
• Conduct periodic skills tests and then continue training to shore up the skills
• Establish recognition and incentives for sales and sales training champions
• Conduct weekly conference call to report sales results
• Conduct national sales meetings
Making supervisors accountable for the selling skills was not fully embraced initially. In fact, two California systems put all responsibility for the program on their business office trainers. But the business office was not in charge of all of the sales results.
“These trainers are good,” Weekes said, “but they couldn’t be responsible for the day-to-day monitoring and coaching that is essential for success.”
After 18 months, the results from both systems were well behind the other systems. One ranked at the bottom of the evaluation completed in early 1990; the other’s sales results were consistently below other systems.
“Week after week, one system reported only a 35% premium sell-in rate while other systems were as high as 75%,” Weekes recounted. “The program got as close to death as possible in these systems.”
Eventually, the “hold outs” couldn’t argue with results. Three systems consistently had better results “because there were more people to train, coach, monitor, and keep it alive,” Weekes said.
“After getting the supervisors involved, the lagging system jumped to a 53% premium sell-in rate.”
Champions
Weekes created a team of sales champions by organizing a weekly conference call for managers and supervisors to report their weekly sales results and discuss their programs.
“The foundation of any sales program is accountability,” Weekes noted. “The conference call makes us accountable because we report our sales results.” And no one wants to be at the bottom of results. The internal competition begins to take hold.
Weekes began with only 11 participants. He now counts more than 90 people on the list for the weekly Tuesday call.
Incentives for Champions
Weekes also set up incentives to reward the champions. The highlight in 1990 was an all expense-paid three-day weekend at Carmel’s Pebble Beach resort. Of the 35 supervisors and managers eligible for this program, 15 achieved their sales objectives and traveled to Carmel.
Adapting Skills to the Sales Job
Viacom Cable’s biggest challenge was to provide training to four distinct sales functions.
For example, while Viacom’s direct sales and telemarketing sales reps clearly understood their sales responsibilities, the inbound telephone and business office reps often viewed themselves simply as order-takers.
Kris Schaeffer & Associates had the solution: A two-part approach to sales training in which all Viacom front-line reps learn 1) the basic communication skills common to all sales interactions, and 2) how to use these skills in their specific sales jobs.
The basic skills training focused on these skills:
Understanding customers’ needs for cable and how cable meets those needs
Building relationships to the customer to establish and maintain rapport
Questioning to uncover needs and concerns
Acknowledging needs and concerns
Offering information to address needs
Tackling objections such as doubts and indifference
The job-specific training focused on how to manage the customer’s buying process and build the customer’s commitment to buy through four stages:
Receptivity. Opening the call and gaining the customer’s willingness to talk.
Interest. Overcoming any initial objections and gaining the customer’s interest.
Desire. Uncovering and addressing customer needs and objections.
Commitment. Closing for the order and addressing any new needs or final objections.
The four job-specific workshops differed in their approach to the four stages. For example, direct sales and telemarketing reps focus on how to open calls and overcome initial objections. In contrast, these stages of the call are quite easy for inbound telephone and business office reps. So, the workshops for these reps emphasize the difference between selling and taking orders and how to uncover customer receives the services that are best suited to that customer.
Kris Schaeffer & Associates designed and developed both the basic skills training and job-specifics workshops, tested that they worked, and then certified the Viacom trainers to conduct the workshops in their systems. KS&A also holds trainer conferences and certifies new trainers.
But Weekes and Westphal want to reward more than sales results – they also want to reward skills use and ever-improving skills levels. To support this, KS&A designed a written selling skills evaluation that was administered to all customer contact reps. The results identified those managers and supervisors to reward and will act as a benchmark for future improvement goals.
“We’ve set goals for this year that include sales results, completion of the training, and a 15-20% improvement in test scores over last year,” Weekes explained.
To help supervisors and managers achieve their results, they attended the second annual national sales meeting, where they received training in how to use games similar to popular TV game shows to review and reinforce skills use.
Weekes predicts that 50% of those eligible will reach their goals and travel to Viacom’s very popular sales trip – a Day At The (Pebble) Beach.