I had a discussion with one of my customers today and he was talking about launching a video conferencing solution that allows for interoperability and interoperability is the key here. They have been successful in implementing this for corporations in UK and it wasn’t straightforward for them to replicate it here. The market that they are looking at is pretty large in India and the quality of the sales force is not of the same standard as they have in UK. Their Indian sales force is a crack team when it comes to product selling but not so convincing when it comes to solution selling. They wanted to roll this out fast and needed to ensure that more legs are trained to sell them.

We brainstormed around this for sometime and arrived at a set of simple things to be addressed during the training:

1. What is all the buzz about Video Conferencing and inter-operability?

2. Major applications and opportunities available in the market

3. Value proposition in terms of business results as opposed to just cost savings

4. Selling beyond the telecom department

5. Selling packaged applications and professional services

6. Technology elements in conferencing solution

7. Understanding the solution elements - technology, systems integration and change management

8. Buying cycle of the customers - how will customers make their decisions and choose their suppliers

9. Understanding the enterprise value chain and finding opportunities within that - targeted discovery, solution description, ROI and metrics

10. Top ten pressing business problems and business functions where this can be applied

11. Vertical and horizontal focus - primarily high-tech, healthcare, export houses, manufacturing and distribution

This I believe would do the trick in getting their sales force up and approaching their target customers with lot more reasons to sell.