// WORK STORY
Promoting Commercial Excellence
We collaborated with Active International to create a globally standardised sales approach and delivered a three-day bootcamp to establish the new process
// Active International
Active International is the leading corporate barter company in the UK. Active delivers effective, innovative barter solutions for clients helping them to ‘Achieve More’ by unlocking hundreds of millions in value annually, from unwanted or under-performing assets to be used against their business expenses, such as marketing spend.
The Challenge
Active operate globally across North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. With offices in 13 countries around these regions, each office and country had its own sales methods and routines. Active wanted a globally standardised way of selling. Interactive Workshops were approached to design a more harmonious process that could be established through effective training.
The Concept
We proposed a mix of content – starting with a three-day in-person workshop and culminating in a digital portfolio on Active’s LMS, so sellers could access sales information and guidance at any time. The digital offering would be multimedia, including videos, eLearnings and infographics to bring content to life.
The Project
We conducted research with a cross-section of the sales workforce to help us understand what selling looked like for Active. Interviews with individuals across the business took place to gather data and get opinions about the process in each country.
Taking the findings from this research, we worked with the Head of the Commercial team to identify a five-step approach sales that could be used uniformly. We consolidated this with three underpinning sales principles to create a new approach, bespoke to the client: The Active Way of Selling.
The process spanned the entire customer lifecycle, from identifying new clients and qualifying leads, through to relationship building, understanding client needs with consultative selling, to best practice for negotiation and closing deals.
Next, we used these foundational skills to design and build an immersive workshop experience. A selection of Active’s top sellers travelled to Barcelona where we facilitated a dynamic two-and-a-half-day workshop, honing in on the skills needed to make a successful sale.
The plot twist? We ran the whole thing backwards.
Sellers started with their final pitch and tracked back through the sales process in simulations to discover more about their clients, unlock their consultative and questioning skills, discover how influencing techniques can cement c-suite sponsorship within the client organisation, and quantify and qualify their existing real-world leads.
The Impact
Energy.
Stretch.
Networking.
Spark.
The reverse engineering of the event helped to land key sales messages and reenforce the idea that sales works best when strong relationships are built and maintained from the very beginning.
We provided templates for sellers to take away, as well as notebooks and stickers to reinforce what participants were learning.
Testimonials
What an amazing three days with Active International colleagues and the excellent L&D crew at Interactive Workshops.
They really took their time to understand our business via pre-training meetings with senior stakeholders and curated bespoke content to focus on those areas that would return the highest ROI.
Learning has never felt so easy with so much energy brought by the IW team coupled with some really effective techniques to ensure the newly acquired content stuck.
Would highly recommend IW to anyone that wants to get the best out of their teams.
Mark Henson, Head of New Business (Participant) The IW team brought fantastic energy to the three days. With a team of very busy and experienced sales people, “training” needs to be value add and enjoyable. IW quickly got everyone onboard and engaged in the process. IW’s agility in getting to know our business and working with senior leaders to build their knowledge led to impactful and well-planned content and activities. This project has been an exciting next step in a great partnership. Thank you, IW!
Gemma Atkinson, COO 