Win-Win Negotiation

This is the introduction to a series of seven microlearning units on win-win negotiation. Recent college graduates starting their first sales position at a major consulting services company completed this training after onboarding. It served not only to introduce the company's preferred sales style, but also set the philosophy expected of all sales team members before more specific training within the team.

Audience: New sales team members starting their first corporate role after university

Responsibilities: eLearning creation, needs assessment, success metrics

Tools: Canva, Storyline 360, Articulate Rise

AI Integrations: Storyboard creation, graphics integration

Goal: Briefly introduce new sales team members to win-win negotiation using the preferred relationship-first langauge of the company, setting a philosophical precedent for the rest of their sales training.

Launch Point: The sales director requested a new training program for new hires after identifying a slow but steady rise in comments from clients about how sales team members varied in their approach, despite the company's reputation for a single, specific relationship style with clients. 

Journey: All seven pieces of training progressed from concept to completion within two weeks as part of a company initiative to more deeply embed their sales ethos into all parts of the sales team, and to encourage retention of new hires likely to fit with the company's preferred sales approach. The director provided examples of existing training, and employees who currently worked with the training program as new hire mentors within the sales team served as SMEs for the content.

We first created a theme sheet of key terms, examples and metaphors that best embodied the philosophy the sales director aimed to encourage, as well as examples of what did not fit. We used this to outline a plan for an additional morning of training focused on the philosophy to start out the in-team training, as well as updating existing training documentation.

Once we created drafts, we selected a sample of new hires who had completed the old training within the last year, as well as a sample of longer-term employees, and collected their feedback on the training, stratifying the data based on whether they received client complaints as well as their overall sales records where applicable. We used this additional information to fine-tune some of the training examples to make them more relevant to the typical new hire profile before launching the new training as part of the next monthly onboarding process.

Results: We received immediate positive feedback from trainers and mentors within the department that new hires in the graduate program (new sales team members in their first role after university) were approaching training with a mindset more aligned to the overall sales ethos that the sales director had in mind, and which fit the company's relationship first strategy. Over the following year, the director noted a clear decrease in the specific kinds of complaints which had prompted the changes in training and the creation of this new piece of training.