The organisation

Interroll is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of key components for unit load handling systems, internal logistics and automation and serves more than 23,000 customers worldwide. Interroll drives, rollers and logistics solutions perform essential materials handling logistics tasks in airports, postal depots, food processing and other large scale applications.

The sales team are technically knowledgeable, and have to interface with many different roles and players in the industry.

The challenge

Interroll Nordics employs both internal and external sales staff. When new starters come on board, it is necessary to help them quickly deliver the sales and service promise that Interroll promises to its clients.

Furthermore, because of the large key accounts the company manages, sales personnel have to interact with sophisticated procurement organisations / individuals. This can sometimes be a challenging experience, when so many sales people have not been trained to understand the aims and objectives of this function.

The solution

Selling Interactions has designed a simple sales curriculum for the Nordic sales organisation:

The training design is highly interactive, with a large element of “group coaching” i.e. focus on personal behaviour change through feedback, action planning and review.

Participants work on real accounts, and the training is phased over several months to enable application and “learning by doing”. To give the programme even more relevance, the section on selling to procurement is delivered by a training consultant who has worked in procurement, to give the “inside track” to sales people.

The Results

With everyone following the curriculum, there is common language in the sales team which saves time when engaging with clients. Furthermore, sales staff are more effective in front of clients, resulting in a higher close rate, and shorter times to close.

For example, in the 2014 programme, one participant closed a deal which alone, returned 5 times the programme investment, through careful preparation for each meeting, setting clear outcome objectives and handling client objections by gathering insights from the client’s client.

The Next steps

The sales curriculum continues to be developed and is cross checked each year against Selling Interaction’s best practice database. For instance, the 2014 programme was updated to include a redesigned social media selling section, reflecting the changing ways in which Linked-in is being used in B2B selling. It is vital not to keep “turning the handle” with sales