Consistent Sales Coaching: Lexmark Leverages Sales Coaching to Shift its Team to Towards a Trusted Advisor Model

Engagement Highlights

• Co-developed value driven sales playbook and shared coaching approach across a team of 10 regional managers and 75 front-line sellers
• Accelerated adoption of a “trust advisor” sales approach across the entire Government Solutions team through consistent skills coaching 
• Increased 1st to 2nd call progression by 19% and increased forecast accuracy by  consistently building a “way forward” out of each 1st meeting

Challenge

Lexmark Government Solutions (LGS) has a unique set of Managed Print and Managed Content Services that help its government customers reduce print costs and increase visibility on document output and information life-cycle management.   LGS had more than 1,500 government organizations customers and historically focused on printers and copier sales. The acquisition in 2016 of several enterprise software providers forced this traditionally product focused sales team to shift consultative selling. The LGS sales team was already working on building a Trusted Advisor selling model based on Six Pillars of Customer Engagement, but had struggled to get a consistent approach to deploying the sales model across the front-line sales team of seventy-five (75). The ten (10) district managers leading this team often found themselves jumping into the role of senior seller trying to manage and progress deals rather than coaching up the team on how to be more effective at solution selling.

Solution

The Vice President and the leader of the LGS sale team engaged Winalytics to build a consistent coaching approach across the ten district managers to support full adoption of the Trusted Advisor sales model.   The Winalytics engagement started with a pilot focused on partnering with a couple of the District Managers that would support the development of repeatable sales playbook working from existing sales and marketing assets. A key part of developing the new playbooks was building customer impacts and proof points specific to the government sector; the team previously had used commercial sector examples that did not hit home with government customers.   The other key was building a repeatable sales playbook and scripts that DMs and AMs could use to improve consistency of messaging and qualification in 1st and 2nd meetings.

After this initial phase, the team moved into an execution mode.  Over a 9-month period, the DM team met once a month to develop, test, and share learnings on coaching strategies.  In between meetings, Winalytics partnered with each DM to do coaching calls with individual AMs, modeling best practices for coaching conversations and helping DMs identify the right skills for focus and developing their coaching calendar and cadence.

Results

Lexmark Government Service with Winalytics’ moved more quickly to deploy the Trusted Advisor sales model across its entire front-line team.  And, over the period of the engagement, was able to maintain a consistent coaching cadence. By partnering with both DMs and senior AMs, the engagement brought many “lone wolf” senior sellers into a shared repeatable approach that made it easier to share their knowledge and success with other team members.