The Hindu Business Line : Training is for all

THE Head of my Training Division, who sits in distant Hong Kong, buzzes me early one morning. She is very excited about this big proposal she has at hand. A potential client in FMCG has approached her for a project in Indonesia. The organisation is all of 3,500 employees strong. They want the whole organisation trained.

Excellent! This means a challenge that spans organisational levels. The training is meant to be one on sales competence to tackle the present and the future. This means big bucks.

The organisation is all for cutting edge front-end skills in the realm of cluttered selling. There are too many salespersons out there reaching out to the same shops with the same set of products. The pricing is largely the same and brand imagery is parri passu. Basically, selling competence is seen to be the edge that will put this organisation ahead of the others. Good thinking here.

For a start, this organisation knows what will count in the future. The selling edge. And it wants to sharpen that selling edge. And guess what, the organisation is intelligent enough to understand that just sharpening the selling-skills end of the guys in the field is not enough. It wants everyone in organisation from CEO to office-boy breathing the language of selling!

This sure is one enlightened organisation! But that is where my admiration stops. Leanne is excited. She has potential revenue from 3,500 employees in the pipeline. She visualises a programme that will keep her team engrossed in work for the next 24 months, for sure. This is a client that is deep in wisdom and deep in work potential as well.

Leanne is excited. I am excited, too. But something intrudes. Leanne tells me the Head of Training and the Head of HR of the organisation are into the nitty-gritty of this planning exercise. Even as they are, they want Leanne to plan for a multi-tier programme. A programme where the front-end salespersons will receive training inputs from a different team and the middle and senior management will receive inputs from a different team altogether. For top management, the requirement is different as well.

Mr James Training Bond from the sales organisation wants a four-tier training programme. The objectives will be the same, but the doling out of inputs will be different. And this is where I differ. And this is where my excitement trickles away into pathos. My question is, why must you differentiate inputs across the team that you train? Why must you dole out the `massified' and the second-rung to the man at the bottom of the pyramid, and the personalised and the top-notch to the guy in the middle and the top?

The rationale is a simple one. The front-end sales guy is the guy who is in the real marketplace. He faces the customer day in and day out. He is the one facing the flak first. He is the soldier in the front. The soldier must be trained just as much and with just as much finesse as the General will be. The moment you differentiate, you create problems.

Most corporate organisations believe in training inputs that are differentiated across the lines of hierarchy. Why? Guess what? The guy at every level today is as intelligent as any. If you train differentially with inputs that are vastly different, you create a culture of differentiation based on the levels one occupies in organisation. What you are doing within sales organisation then is the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of every level operating within the paradigm of stated level inefficiency.

Leadership today is a different game altogether. So is sales leadership. The sales leader today is not necessarily at the top of the organisation. The new sales leader is all about adopting the best practices that he learns, from his subordinates, even!

Do remember, the better salespersons in organisations are the salespersons at the front end. The higher you climb the ladder, the more blunted your selling edge. Let me quote Warren Bennis then. The gent is all of 80. Forbes magazine calls him the `Dean of Leadership Gurus.' Bennis shouts from the rooftop: "The imperial leader is dead as a dodo. In a complex world where nobody has all the answers, true leaders abandon their egos and thrive on the talent of their followers."

Sales leadership today needs to learn from the frontline leadership that manages the day for the organisation. It is indeed your frontline employees who manage much of the physical show on the ground. The guy who handles the physical events of the day-to-day marketplace is therefore the guy who is most informed. Learn from them, then!

Teach them as well what you want to learn for yourself. Train them with the best of the best. Train them with stuff that you yourself at the head of the organisation wants to learn.

Leanne, you must convince the potential client at your doorstep that you really want to take on this project. You will, however, take it on provided you are able to convince the organisational leadership that what training input you will dole out will be as cutting edge as the one that top leadership itself wants to learn.

Only when the whole organisation sits together, cutting out the barriers of levels, will the true training module work with the efficiency score it is meant to deliver. Only when your salesman understands that there is indeed a level playing field on the learning inputs platform, will he truly break out of the inefficiency syndrome that normally wraps levels within organisation in.

Training is for all. Education is for all. When the entire organisation is exposed to the best, it will deliver its best.

Go for the best, then!

(The writer is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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