Mazda - Car Sales

In the car sales workstream we needed to deal with selling skills of car salesmen in those dealerships around southeast England.

It was a similar programme to the delicatessen one I managed - selling skills, upselling, more-selling. We trained them, played mystery shopper, had a training film, coached them, etc...

And as usual in projects like these it was a TTT approach, where we trained the trainer (TTT) and the trainer (the local car dealership managers) trained their sales staff. The board director was part of a film where he had to "send out the message" about the project, etc.

That whole workstream was pretty successful. I was only vaguely involved as my collage Judith was responsible for that work stream.

Unfortunately, I do not have too many pictures, in fact close to none, of this project.

Otto Bock - Sales (Front End, Sales)

In the Sales department we implemented a management system comprising meeting structure, KPIs, etc. There was also a re-organisation in that department and a new director took over. We worked on the sales process, selling techniques, but did not roll out something like my project before. Again, main focus was order entry as this was the most vital issue for the new director.

Selling Wine

This delicatessen project was quite a success, especially within Proudfoot, as we have completely rewritten and remodelled that selling skills manual they had. There was a very small project at the time, it was a vineyard in Germany, that also needed selling skills.

I was assigned to that project for a few weeks and implemented a similar programme there. This project was a very strange project, as it was more like a private coaching project for the son and heir of the vineyard rather than getting some selling skills across and the project manager was not overly happy about it.

I think the son was extremely strange and what he really needed was professional care rather than management coaching. Oh well, not for me to judge. I did my thing and on one day I got a call to move over to my biggest challenge so far - a company called Otto Bock.

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (6)

And then, finally, after the management system was ready to go and the managers trained and trainers and coaches we needed to tour the country (all 4 sales regions) and train, train, train...

And I must say, the area sales managers did all an extremely good job. I was rather impressed.

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (3)

We also needed to implement daily/weekly review meetings with the sales force. The 4 area sales managers of Germany needed a single system for managing their sales force and we implemented that. We created agendas of what to talk about, how to link sales to the weekly figures and reports, etc.

We even got rankings of who were the best sellers with the highest margins for the company. One of the area managers was our task force, Uwe Kossatz, who was responsible for the east German market. Another task force was Michael Gebauer, a Hamburg based marketing manager. The 4 of us were an extremely good team and we were pretty efficient with the programme.

Salmon, Shrimps and Krautsalad (2)

Unfortunately, I have lost all documentation about that project and in fact, about most projects, so I must rely on my brains for details. I remember we did a brown paper session and figured out their main problems in their processes. But apart from those process inefficiencies, which were actually a missing management system for the company, we were tasked with the training programme regarding selling skills. On the picture is my colleague Emmanuel Quentin.

Management system was easy. The client did not have an idea about their margins of their products, just a rough one which were money makers and which were not. The most selling product was “krautsalat”, which is very German and means something like cabbage salad. They sold tons of that stuff, but hardly got any money back. On the other, products like crab salad, which was hardly sold, delivered a very high margin. So, we needed to create a management information system which first highlighted high margin products per area and which second reported on single sales efforts of sales staff so that high margin selling was manageable.

Building Management

After that disastrous automotive supplier I was assigned to a project in east Germany, in Leipzig. It was for Deutsche Telekom's Building and Asset Management company. It was a very small project, and my assignment was only to help out the project manager with some training input he needed.

As far as I rememer the project was in the company's sales department. I drove around with the area managers and coached them in their selling and customer relations skills.

Apart from that I do not know a lot anymore. One thing is interesting though with writing this blog. The more I am thinking about my past as consultant it is absolutely amazing how many sales projects I have taken part at so far. And there are a few to come still. The really interesting thing is, that nowadays I "sell" myself as supply chain expert, but in fact, I could easily add "sales systems."

Selling Furniture

The other skills area which is interesting is sales enhancement. Basically this means up-selling and more-selling by giving training to the sales force. This sales force can be either in a shop or they can travel from client to client. This does not matter, as the skills-set is always the same.

One needs to train them the "5 steps of selling", how to ask what kind of questions, closing techniques, preparation and "post"paration systems (post-paration as "what to do after a sales call?"), etc. Even though everybody talks about relationship-based selling these days, which is different to the usual selling skills, but on that commodity goods level, the usual skills-set is more than fine and appropriate. I will go into more detail when I am talking about my first project as project manager where I managed a sales programme.

So, my next project was back to the old one, the furniture retailer with 50 shops around Germany. We developed a selling skills model for them, trained it, and followed up on the newly learned techniques with coaching, mystery shoppers, audits, etc.

The project closed prematurely. The weekly invoice was too high to bear for the client. I think they tried to do it themselves with the task forces we trained. A few months later after the project has been stopped the company went bust and into administration. It does not exist anymore.

For me it was a good project as I learned everything about selling.