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In an increasingly competitive business environment the ability to identify and meet the needs of your customers is vital. Our sales training, based on the principles of Magical Innovation, empowers sales staff to build solid client relationships. Our training provides the skills necessary to identify and understand customer needs in order to provide individual and intelligent solutions.

 

With a totally fresh perspective to role-play (ask anyone who has been there!) and an insistence that we tailor our training to individuals, we focus all our sales training on the customer rather than the product. The results are training courses unlike any other; engaging and empowering individuals to meet and exceed targets with effective communication techniques designed to improve sales.

Successful Selling is a training course that explains psychological rules and techniques that magicians use to guide people to a particular perception and then applies them to the key business skill of selling.

Click here to download course details  (PDF format 1,067kb)

How we 'rewrote' a 100+ page sales training manual on just one sheet of paper and a tuba!

Map

A telecommunications company wished to improve the effectiveness and reduce the cost of the training it gave to its field sales staff.

Audit

The existing training process was a 4.5 day induction programme conducted in traditional class room style and based around working through a highly detailed handbook of over 100 pages.

Magical Innovation™ immediately identified that participants were being 'pre-programmed' to fail! The sheer length and apparent complexity of both the course and the handbook made the process seem long, dull and, above all, difficult.

We started by pinpointing the precise nature of the Field Sales Staff job and then identifying the core information they needed to succeed in their job. The research findings showed that 70 of the 100 pages within the handbook contained information that was peripheral to the day-to-day needs of Field Sales Staff.

Gameplan

The 30 pages of 'core information' were then distilled into 'nuggets' that filled a single sheet of paper!

Just showing the delegates this replacement for the handbook had the effect of pre-programming them to succeed - they could immediately see that the challenge ahead was achievable.

Techniques deployed to ensure that all information was both effective and memorable included:

• Every message was scripted and reconfigured to create the most positive possible context eg 'what it costs' became 'how much you save'; 'we only charge half as much as our competitors' became 'our competitors charge twice as much as us'.
• Comparative data was translated into simple conversational style eg. '206 per cent' became 'twice as much'.

• Concepts and lists were recreated in a tangible 3D format wherever possible. Eg Intangible subscription services were described through sets of cards enabling focus on quantity, groupings, savings and specific details as required.

• Mnemonics - based on well known tunes and phrases were created to ensure that key messages could be remembered. And the mnemonics themselves were brought to life through devices such as the presence of a musician playing the relevant tunes.

• Simple psychometric coaching also enabled participants to 'read' the body language of potential customers and thereby identify and deal with any initial concerns.

As well as making the information more effective and memorable, the distillation process allowed the training time to be reduced from 4.5 days to just 1.5 days. .

Implementation

• Instead of class room-style seating, the format was changed constantly in order to break the delegates' pattern.

• The programme was divided into two parts, starting with a shorter, simpler session. Although unequal, the two parts were constantly referred to as 'halves', so that a triumphant feeling of 'half way there' was felt when the first part was successfully completed.

• Tests and games throughout showed participants that they had succeeded. They departed after just 1.5 days with their first selling challenge set in their minds.

Conclusion

• Participants' ability to remember their key messages was self-evident from their response and also recorded through excellent results for a much more stringent test than used previously.
• Participants clearly had fun while learning. They went away both confident and inspired - as evidenced by sales success.
• The cost and salary savings of reducing a residential training programme from 4.5 days to 1.5 were considerable.