Challenge
Unisys, a worldwide services and solutions company with expertise in consulting, systems integration and outsourcing, needed to heighten the business and financial acumen of its global sales force. The goal was to enable team members to credibly convey how Unisys can help clients apply IT for business advantage and success. Unisys wanted a consistent selling motion throughout its sales organization to ensure that the business value of its solutions was compellingly positioned. With more than 31,000 employees worldwide, both time to market and cost to train an organization of this size were key investment considerations.
Solution
Executive Conversation teamed with Unisys and the company’s other learning partners to develop a comprehensive blended learning solution consisting of Executive-Led Workshops, eLearning, performance simulations and mobile learning components. The Unisys sales force was segmented by job type and desired competency level to determine curriculum components appropriate by role. An eLearning experience customized from the ground up was created for Unisys and these versions of our online courseware were deployed across the organization. Our Executive Focused Selling workshop was customized to integrate into this blended curriculum and delivered to appropriate audience segments.
Results
Executive-Led Workshop participants assessed the impact of the learning experience as opening up over USD $30 million in pipeline opportunities for Unisys in the three months following completion of the program. Blended learning modules were deployed to 1,100 client-facing sales team members globally resulting in more than 100 comprehensive client business plans being developed for Unisys’ top 500 accounts during learning sessions. An additional 150 comprehensive client business plans were subsequently developed outside of sessions. Participants reported recalibrating the way they interact with customers, reaching higher inside the organizations they were calling on and having more business-oriented conversations around the financial impact of Unisys solutions. Better quality meetings are leading to shortening of the sales cycle.