Synthego

Synthego and Corporate Visions hit the ground running. “We immediately integrated our training into everything we did,” Tan said, including sales meetings (where sellers rotate regionally to share success stories using their new skills and messages), regional meetings, business reviews, and weekly Friday trainings.

Synthego credits sales leadership training as instrumental to their ability to transform their team. “Your managers are going to be the reason why skills and methods are adopted or not,” Tan said. “You have to make sure that your managers are adequately trained and supported to coach those skills.”

Due to their investment in supporting their managers, “we had buy-in from our managers right from the get-go,” said Rachel Llanas, Senior Director of Global Sales. “That was a powerful way for us to get exposure and reinforcement. We solidified this approach together as a management and leadership team.”

Along the way, the Synthego team had to overcome some cognitive dissonance. Tan points to a moment in training that changed everything about the way their sellers pursued renewals and expansion with their customers, who comprise 70 percent of their revenue.

“Our collective group was there when Why Stay (customer retention messaging) versus Why Evolve (customer expansion messaging) was brought up. There was a moment where the entire room went silent as the facilitator explained the difference,” Tan said. “We realized that all we’d been doing was sending out a Why Change (customer acquisition) message, inadvertently teaching our customers to leave us because we weren’t giving them a Why Stay or a Why Evolve message. It was a shocking moment for all of us to realize it’s not just about our Why Change message.”

The Synthego team also got much clearer about their Why You message (their unique selling proposition). Tan explains, “Our strategy team and marketing team together used the Value Wedge concept to define our USP more powerfully. We realized that what we were saying was our USP—other people could do that, too. Methodically going through our key capabilities together was eye-opening. We asked ourselves, is this really what we can stand behind in a way that no one else can? We had always presented our capabilities as technical information. But when we defined it as Synthego’s four characteristics of value, this made it more concrete for our sellers and our buyers. Now we can defend our business.”