Newground Case Study
Sales training for Social Enterprise moving from free Government funded services to chargable
75% reduction in enquiry to visit ratios through effective qualification processes and questioning
This resulted in more profit & effective use of consultants time
The Client
Groundwork Pennine Lancashire (now Newground) is the largest environmental charity in Lancashire. Their purpose is to build sustainable communities, working with partners to help improve people’s lives, their prospects and potential and the places where they live, work and play.
The Challenge
The business support division of Groundwork Pennine Lancashire provides consultancy services to businesses throughout Lancashire. Much of this work was previously funded and offered to the clients for free. However, due to a reduction in the amount of funding received by local authorities and funding bodies, Groundwork decided to concentrate on services that would provide private income instead. They identified their environmental and health and safety consultancy services as having the most potential to provide this private income. Unfortunately the consultants were not used to selling their services privately and lacked confidence in identifying customer needs and showing how we could help to meet them.
The S2S Solution
Solutions2Success devised and provided a bespoke course entitled ‘Consultative Selling Master Class”. The course was customised to Groundwork’s requirements and focused on a softer, consultative method of selling. It looked at structuring telephone conversations and meetings to ensure effectiveness and identify customer needs and also at how to generate orders through consultative selling techniques. The consultants were very pleased with the course, warming to the soft approach to selling their services. The feedback received showed that the course had given them confidence and taught them some really useful techniques that could be used well into the future.
The Benefits
The participants felt it was evident that the course had been designed just for Groundwork Pennine Lancashire and were pleased with the relevance of the topics discussed and techniques learnt. Several key outcomes were:
- Improved qualification has led to a 75% reduction in enquiry-to-visit ratio, saving many days worth of consultant’s time every month
- Increase in amount of private sales gained & confidence to sell other services
- Time savings made by knowing how to structure conversations, emails and meetings to gain maximum efficiency
- Discussion of best practice has led to knowledge sharing in the division
- Development of management systems to assist in sales has saved time, improved organisation and increased confidence
The Verdict
“Debbie was an excellent trainer who everyone warmed to immediately and the training has increased sales and confidence.
As a social enterprise, we take a softer, friendlier approach with our customers and this obviously caused some doubt about whether we should be providing sales training to our consultants. However, Solutions2Success designed a course with a softer approach and everyone who attended was really pleased with this. They learnt how to talk to customers and sell our services without coming across like a salesperson. We would recommend using Solutions2Success to anybody – we’ve already booked them for another course next month!”
Amanda Payne, Marketing & Communications Manager, Groundwork Pennine Lancashire.
