Global Sales Training at Tripwire, Inc. Rated “Best Ever”

Business Issue

Tripwire, a leading provider of data and network integrity software, needed to train a worldwide sales team selling in 15 countries. The team faced a number of negotiation challenges:

  • Educating the buyer regarding the competitive advantages of this company's technical solutions

  • Educating and coaching the initial contact, often a systems administrator, to successfully "negotiate up" to persuade his or her boss of the need for the solution

  • Pressure from large clients who push for unprecedented discounts in the last quarter of the year

  • Determining when it is in the company's best interest to walk away from a deal

Tripwire sought sales training for the annual meeting of the worldwide sales team that was tailored to their challenges. The training also needed to be:

  • Appropriate to the variety of needs in the room - from those who made direct sales to those who managed channels of distribution, forging relationships with distributors and crafting joint marketing agreements

  • Compatible with and explicitly linked to the sales training methodology in which the worldwide sales force had been trained

Process

Accordence conducted diagnostic interviews with a cross-section of the worldwide sales force, speaking with individuals who sold domestically, to channels, and overseas. Accordence used the diagnostics to create a 2-day workshop reflective of the broad array of challenges facing the sales force.

In order to make the workshop relevant to all participants, facilitators used a variety of examples and at appropriate times, split the group in half to create two different application sessions; one for those who sold to distribution channels and one for those in direct sales.

Accordence facilitators' experience with the company's current sales training program, and in teaching in tandem with that methodology, enabled them to make explicit links between the two methodologies, and to make concrete suggestions to help participants integrate both into their everyday negotiations.

Result

In their feedback to their VP of Sales and to facilitators, a number of participants rated the Accordence training the best they had ever had, noting particularly the care taken by Accordence to tailor the workshop to their specific challenges.