This initiative from the telecommunication company’s corporate university, in partnership with GP Strategies as an educational partner, has promoted an asynchronous training for retailers throughout Brazil, with a focus on sales of products related to fiber (land-based broadband and cable TV). The training was a success, bringing excellent participation and performance results for a challenging product in the Brazilian market.
Challenge
In Brazil, there has been a need for investments to expand landline, cable TV, and broadband technology infrastructure nationwide, which has impacted the price of these services in the country. Conversely, the prices of mobile service bundles have shown a reduction in the Brazilian market. As a result, consumer demand for landline services has decreased.
The largest telecommunications company in Brazil (with over 50 million customer) acquired landline technology. The company has been confronted with low landline product sales in the consumer market. Because of this, enabling store employees to sell a complete set of products and services for both landlines and mobile phones has proven to be a major challenge.
Solution
GP Strategies, the company’s talent transformation partner, received a request from the B2C commercial directors, along with the training team, for a learning program to reinforce sales of fiber-optic broadband services. The main goal was to increase sales and train retailers on all topics related to fiber-optic technology to provide a more complete solution for customers.
There was a clear need to centralize the information for selling line-based solutions in a single location—one that could be quickly and easily accessed by salespeople through devices such as tablets and smartphones—and to provide related employee self-development resources.
To achieve the goal of providing attractive and easy-to-understand training materials related to technical and commercial aspects of fiber and increasing the success of salespeople’s proposal capacity, the following topics were defined for the training content:
- Adapting the sales speech to offer a complete solution.
- Understanding the sales cycle of the landline-based technology solution.
- Developing communication skills to present landline-based products.
- Using a problem-solving process as a guide for the narrative.
- Establishing a culture of self-development.
Based on the survey and the company’s goals, GP developed and delivered a complete asynchronous training program for retailers, which achieved the targeted business objectives with a high level of learner satisfaction.
Results
The objectives set for the program were:
- Participation of 30% of salespeople (960 salespeople out of a total of 3,197) during the three-month launch period.
- Positive impact on sales, considering the challenging policies for the fiber product.
- The program was a success from an engagement standpoint, reaching 1,401 trained employees (44% participation) between August and October 2022.
To measure sales, we compared trained and untrained individuals before and after training. We observed a positive impact on specific line-based service results in the main sales indicators.
The company analyzed new-sales results for individuals trained in August, September, and October to assess their performance in the three months before and after training. This analysis found an increase in their sales performance, with an average of 8.3% more sales after completing the training.
Moreover, when evaluating landline service sales retention, the company tracked the rates at which customers cancelled their subscriptions and compared the results for trained versus untrained employees.
- For the three-month period before the program launch, there was no variation in the cancellation rates for trained and untrained employees.
- After launch, there was a 60% reduction in cancellations reported for trained salespeople in the month of their program participation.
- Over the three months following training, there were 50% fewer cancellations for trained salespeople.
