What does the case indicate about the training "readiness" of the company's salespeople?

Case Study

Meadowbrook Golf, Headquartered in Championsgate, Florida, is a leader in golf course management, maintenance, and supplies in the U.S. Today the organization is compromised of four companies that meet the demands of the market: Meadowbrook Golf provides the management, International Golf Maintenance provides the maintenance, and Golf Ventures East and West are the golf supply arms of the business.

Ron Jackson is the CEO of Meadowbrook. The turf business is a highly specialized, tight-knit industry. The company’s strong reputation was built on its expertise in providing superior products and services to golf courses and municipalities. Ron knew the only way he could take the company to the next level was not to only find the right people with the specific experience they needed but to find a what to keep them happy and motivated so they would stay. Jackson learned of a behavioral assessment tool called Predictive Index, produced by the Wellesley, Massachusetts-based management consulting company PI World-wide, and brought it into Meadowbrook as a way to help the managers understand what motivated their employees to come to work every day. By obtaining this insight, Jackson says Meadowbrook was able to keep its talent by “managing them for their individual success.” Meadowbrook also realized that their top performers possessed very similar behavioral characteristics. Using this information, Meadowbrook was able to incorporate this information into its hiring process.

Golf Venture West, the supply division of Meadowbrook in the western U.S., offers equipment that ranges from a string trimmer to a $70,000 rotary motor, along with fertilizers, seed, and specialty products. Mike Eastwood, the president of GVW, had the best talent in the industry, long-time clients, and very low turnover. While it all seemed idealistic, Eastwood had a problem. He needed his team to sell more.

The challenge was how to identify what they needed in sales training to help them grow their sales. In sharing his concerns with Jackson, Eastwood learned that the publishers of the Predictive Index also offered a selling training tool that identified the strengths of salespeople and areas for their development as well as offered customer-focused sales (CFS) training. To explore the tool further, he and his senior management team took the assessment themselves. The results accurately identified Eastwood’s selling style. His general managers most over 30 years in the industry, scored in the mid to high range. Next Eastwood gave his sales team members the assessment. However, their overall scores were in the mid-to-low range. Eastwood quickly realized that despite the talent of his sales team, 80 percent of them did not know how to sell. The results of the assessment showed that most of them were not asking enough investigative questions when speaking with their clients.

This was a huge breakthrough. Eastwood’s team members then took the CFS workshop to learn how to think like customers do and investigate and uncover their needs. The results? “My most senior and successful salesperson followed the CFS process and closed a $40,000 deal with a customer that had only purchased from our competitor for the last ten years,” says Eastwood. In another instance, Eastwood had a sales person who was underperforming but knew he had the potential to be successful. This salesperson went through the sales training and was moved to a new territory.” In 4 months he has sold more in his new territory than he had in a year in his original territory” says Eastwood. Apparently, the training is paying off. Even though golf courses, in general, have been struggling in recent years, Golf Ventures West has expanded its operations r a number of new locations across the country.