A Market Research Training Story - You can find consistent growth with your human BEINGS
NOTE, if you want to learn about this topic in more detail and in video format, get in touch here to get the recording of the recent open workshop we ran on Zoom.
Here’s a story that you may be familiar with.
There was a successful Client Services Director called Sarah, who worked in a mid-sized market research agency with offices in a dozen countries around the world.
Sarah looked after the client service teams for her research agency. She was also in charge of the data expert teams, those brilliant people that every research agency needs to create the backbone of insight that clients demand.
Since COVID, the agency that Sarah worked for enjoyed boosted growth. Clients came back into the market to catch up on their insights and activity.
Towards the back end of 2022 however, the peak of this growth had been reached and the incoming inquiries began to dwindle.
Sarah realised this trend was happening long before COVID. Reactive briefs were down and a boom-bust pattern of win-deliver-win was de rigeur throughout the year. She also saw there was massive potential in getting her client service and data expert teams to go out and have a chat with clients about doing more work with them.
The problem was this. Whenever she tried to get her teams to sell more:
A handful of individuals would take on the challenge and do quite well at it.
Others would have a go, gamely, and would win work sporadically.
Most would do anything to avoid anything to do with selling. Doing admin became suddenly very important for them.
Some were so scared of selling, that they outright refused to do it. Or hid under their desks. Or simply left the business.
Sarah had already realised a few years ago that client service teams needed some additional support to feel comfortable enough to sell. She had previously bought training programs to help the teams develop their skills and even offered some additional coaching support to help build their confidence.
This approach was met with some success, but it was limited and short term. After a brief spike in sales or commercial activity, the team settled back into their more familiar and comfortable roles of delivering excellent work and hoping requests would come in.
So Sarah realised that this time she had to do something different. This time, Sarah wanted to instil long-term mindset and behaviour change in her teams when it came to selling. The question was, how?
We’re going to end the story on that cliff-hanger. See you in the next blog.
Just kidding. In all seriousness, if you have been in any commercial leader or manager role in client services during your career, you may well be familiar with this challenge. It’s a challenge that isn’t going away either – in fact, it’s getting more and more urgent to address.
How do you answer this pressing issue?
The answer lies in differentiating your approach between your sales teams (if you have dedicated ones) and your client service teams.
For example, you wouldn’t develop your professional sales team to become brilliant at delivering what they’ve sold.
You know they’re not interested in it, it’s not their forte and what would happen to your pipeline, right?
Yet all too often, client service and expert services teams are given professional sales teams tools, processes and frameworks via training, and expected to become brilliant, professional sales teams. Guess what? The same, in reverse, is true:
You know they’re not interested in it, it’s not their forte and what would happen to your retention levels??
It just doesn’t work.
They are different in their outlook, their motivations, their reasons for working. Sarah realised this, and years ago so did we.
Since we began, we’ve focused more and more in this space. Market Research training isn’t just about giving people the skills to ‘do’ research. It’s about giving them the skills and confidence to be brilliant with clients as well. In other words, giving client service and expert teams the confidence and energy to develop business growth as well as deliver brilliance, but in a way that comes from within. Because that’s the only way it works for the long-term.
We’ve refined and honed our approach over the years to a point where we can summarise it at a truly human level.
Now that you know you need to differentiate your approach between sales and client service, you can make a start very quickly.
It all begins with approaching it from a different position. Indeed, it’s a very different one from the traditional approach of immediately going through frameworks and processes that the team then needs to adopt.
To illustrate this, let’s back up a moment and look at what Sarah has experienced before when it comes to commercial training.
Nearly every sales training approach out there required her people to do specific things to sell more – follow a process, do certain activities and so on..
These approaches focused on doing things, answering the question:
‘What do you need to DO, to achieve commercial growth?’.
Of course, these approaches can most certainly be effective, and there are lots of brilliantly crafted and thought-through techniques and tools that can help find growth.
There is a downside to starting from here, however. It’s trying to create change in a person, but from the outside, in. Meaning those changes can often not be ‘sticky’ enough to become lifelong habits.
Where you need to start from therefore, is from the inside, out. To give your teams the best chance of making new behaviors habit, you need to set out to answer a subtly different question:
‘What do you need to BE, to achieve commercial growth?’
What a difference this starting point makes! Because now you and your team are able to properly identify, with clarity and precision, what needs to be done.
This is the point of maximum leverage when it comes to changing behaviours. It starts from the person themselves and gives them the opportunity to bring all their brilliance to the party first and foremost.
Therefore, it’s a much more advanced and motivating position to begin from. Because it builds from your/your team’s position of strength.
From all our work with companies, teams and individuals, we know they are already 80%+ towards being able to develop growth as well as deliver brilliance. Without resorting to pro sales frameworks or starting with ‘the DO’!
Suddenly the journey seems less daunting. A shorter leap, more like a few small steps.
This is such an exciting way to look at developing your teams to find growth consistently that we’ve even ran our very first live, open workshop on how to get started getting teams thinking about what they need to BE.
In the next blog shorter blog, we’ll show you how to get your people thinking about their BE, and give you tips on how to get started moving from the BE to the DO, and ultimately moving successfully to your commercial goal.
BUT, if you want to find out sooner than that, then get in touch to get the recording of the recent open workshop we ran on Zoom, covering exactly this topic and what you need to do to get started on the path to motivating your client service and expert teams to sell.