South-East Sales Representative

Company Background

Leadership Strategies - The Facilitation Company is an Atlanta-based organization that has rapidly become one of the national leaders in facilitation.  We are a growing company known for bringing practical, dynamic and interactive approaches to training and critical meetings. We are seeking an additional client relationship manager to help grow our business.

q      We train people in facilitation, leadership, consulting, communication, and team building skills. The Effective Facilitator – our flagship course – is one of the leading courses in the nation in providing people with fundamental and advanced skills in group facilitation.  The Effective Consultant, Masterful Meetings, From Management to Leadership and Strategic Planning are also popular offerings.  We offer public classes and on-site private classes for clients around the nation and the world.

q      We provide companies with professional facilitators who lead executive teams and task forces through such processes as strategic planning, issue resolution, requirements analysis, process improvement, focus groups, community engagement, and conferences. Our facilitators are experts in the Principles of Facilitationtm, a comprehensive approach for facilitating any session, and ensure a consistent level of quality and effectiveness in our work.

q      We operate the national facilitator database.  Through NFDB.com, we extend our core facilitation team with a network of over 200 facilitators throughout the U.S.  The database provides our clients with quality facilitators on a more local basis.Position Overview

As a client relationship manager, you will cover a territory encompassing the south eastern seaboard.  As a member of the sales team, your ultimate objective each month is to achieve the highest sales volume you can while maximizing your commissions, satisfying client needs and meeting internal support requirements (see below).  In achieving this objective, you are responsible for a number of activities.  This list below is ranked in priority order based on our beliefs about what is required for your success.  Your experience may change this order.

1.      Establish, maintain and execute a territory plan to maximize the revenue generated from the territory.

2.      Follow up on all leads provided through the Internet within 24 hours, through in-house personnel within 48 hours, and through the newsletter and other sources within one week.

3.      Follow up with private class/consulting clients and public class attendees from the prior month within one week of the engagement to review facilitator performance and seek other opportunities and referrals.

4.      Contact each key account at least monthly and all assigned accounts at least quarterly.

5.      Prospect and perform mailings/telephone follow-up to a targeted list of at least five prospects per month.

6.      Average at least 40 telephone sales call per office day.

7.      Ensure that each public class scheduled in your region is filled and includes, at a minimum, the number of full-pay-equivalent participants to avoid cancellation.

8.      Meet administrative responsibilities, including timely updating of engagement summaries and track all activities in the CRM system.

9.      With permission from the client, perform mailings to, or add to our newsletter list, everyone attending a facilitated session.

10.  Arrange briefings, demonstrations, brown-baggers, presentations to get facilitators in front of clients.

11.  Manage a quarterly regional budget ($1500) to be used for travel, marketing and other activities in your region, including client face-to-face visits as appropriate.

12.  As you deem beneficial, attend trade shows, increase skills through training, attend association meetings of facilitators and other outside activities.

Skills

We believe the following skills are necessary for success in this particular position.

1.      Diagnose a customer’s need and compare to our product set to develop a specific solution for that customer

2.      Engage clients and prospects in meaningful discussion to help clients envision how our services will address their needs

3.      Gain a customers trust; establish expectations; and follow through on those expectations

4.      Identify and communicate when our services are inappropriate

5.      Think strategically by taking what might appear as a small opportunity and identifying and connecting to the bigger need

6.      Present verbally and in written form

7.      Demonstrate business acumen

8.      Maximize the use of a systematic sales process

9.      Juggle many priorities at once

10.  Be proactive in seeking out new opportunities and growing the territory

Attitude

The successful candidate will embody the following attitudes:

1.      Enthusiasm for work

2.      Energy

3.      Professionalism

4.      Persistence

5.      Personal responsibility

6.      Team orientation

7.      Integrity

Experience

Mandatoryq       At least three years of direct sales experienceq       At least one year in a position requiring heavy prospecting activity

Desirableq       At least one year selling in a service industryq       At least one year experience utilizing customer centric selling, solution selling, or some other structured consultative sales methodologyq       At least one year selling training or consulting servicesq       At least one year in a small business with less than $10 million in revenueHow to Maximize Your Chance of Landing This Position

Send your resume and narrative letter to sales@leadstrat.com . In your narrative letter, please address each of the following questions.

We recognize that we are asking you to give considerable information about your suitability for this position.  We want to make sure the person we hire understand our needs and that the business relationship with our firm is truly win-win. Answering the following questions in your narrative letter will help us ensure this position is truly right for you.

Please understand that if you send us a standard cover letter that describes your skills without responding to our specific needs, we will assume that this position is not suitable for you.

 

Your narrative letter should address each of the following questions. 1.      Grow territoryq       Describe your most successful sales position in which you were able to grow the business in your territory over a 12-month period.  Tell us what the results were and what you did to achieve those results.2.      Engage clientsq       We would like to get an idea of your ability to engage prospects over the phone.  Choose a product that you have sold in the past, and give us the 2-to-5 sentences you would use if you were contacting a prospect for the first time about that product.  How would you get the conversation started?  What would you say? 3.      Think strategicallyq       We are seeking to understand your ability to help clients think strategically. Tell us about a client of yours that started with one product and you were able to grow to use other products?  What did the client start with?  What additional products did they purchase?  What did you do to get them to make the additional investment?

4. Experience

Explain your experience in each of the areas cited below.  Please provide adequate detail (e.g., cite dates, quota, performance) for us to recognize that you meet each requirement.  Bullet points are adequate for this section.Mandatoryq       At least three years of direct sales experience, q       At least one year in a position requiring heavy prospecting activityHighly Desirableq       At least one year selling in a service industryq       At least one year experience utilizing customer centric selling, solution selling, or some other structured consultative sales methodologyq       At least one year selling training or consulting servicesq       At least one year in a small business with less than $10 million in revenueAdditional Background on the Company

Our Vision: The Facilitation Company

Leadership Strategies will be the provider of choice for facilitation. When an organization needs a facilitator or facilitation-related, soft skills training, they will think first of Leadership Strategies – The Facilitation Company.

Our Mission

To serve as a facilitator of positive, impactful results for our clients through practical, dynamic, and interactive facilitation and training services.

Our Values

As associates of Leadership Strategies, we actively create the workplace we desire by living the following principles.q       We maintain a positive, team environment.  We are positive in our communications and we support each other with assistance, information and guidance, as opposed to being concerned only about self and bringing negative energy into the workplace.q       We take personal responsibility.  If we have an issue, we take responsibility for getting it solved (as opposed to complaining to others or withdrawing); when we make mistakes we admit our responsibility.q       We do the right thing, even when no one is looking.  We strive to maintain a high level of integrity and consistency in our interactions with our clients and each other.  Dishonesty is not tolerated.q       We meet our clients’ needs, not just satisfy their requirements.  We strive to understand our clients’ real needs to ensure that we provide solutions that work.q       We seek continuous improvement.  We strive not to make the same mistake twice.  When a mistake is made, not only do we correct it, we seek to understand why the mistake occurred and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.

Our Positioning Strategy

Facilitation is a specialized sub-set of two large industries.  In the management consulting arena, facilitators are used for developing strategies, identifying requirements, engaging the community in reviewing government projects, etc.  In the training arena, facilitation training is sought by team leaders, project leaders, task forces, trainers, planners, etc.

Facilitation is much like the video industry prior to Blockbuster.  In both consulting and training, the facilitation specialty is a cottage industry.  With few exceptions, the vendors who specialize in these services are small organizations (under 5 people) or independent contractors.  The largest player (Interaction Associates) likely has less than 5% of the market share. 

Our vision at Leadership Strategies is to become the Blockbuster of facilitation.  When organizations think of facilitation, they think of us first.

To achieve this position we are expanding our sales force and embarking on a national strategy seeking to establish client relationships with Fortune 1000 companies.  Our focus is on three specific customer segments:q       HR and training directors for training and facilitation consulting services in corporate and governmentq       Information technology, hardware, software, telecommunications and consulting organizations for our soft-skills training series designed specifically for IT professionalsq       Non-profit organizations and associations for our strategy facilitation and training services

Our Brand: The PDI Difference

In our market place, the Leadership Strategies brand is known for three things – The PDI difference.q       Practical. We take "touchy-feely" concepts - like facilitation and relationship management - and isolate the detailed, step-by-step techniques for success.  We not only tell participants what techniques work, we show them how they work, why they work, and when and where to use them.  For example, our facilitation course includes 10 broad principles and over 90 specific techniques for implementing the principles.  We break the most difficult concepts down to their critical elements to make learning and application that much easier. Participants tell us they refer back to our training manuals frequently for guidance in addressing work situations.q       Dynamic. Our facilitators receive rave reviews for their energetic presentation style. And their energy is contagious. Our certification programs demonstrate the role of energy in engaging a group and energizing a topic.  Therefore our facilitators utilize energy to maximize interest and participation.q       Interactive.  In our workshops we utilize a series of dynamic, high impact modules to maximize learning transfer.   Participants are grouped into teams from the very beginning; and as each module is presented, the facilitators constantly challenge the teams with content-specific questions and interventions.  For some seminars, mock versions of "Jeopardy" and "Family Feud" are used to increase retention even further. Past participants tell us they retain so much more information from our workshops because we are constantly building and reviewing through these interactive techniques.

In the past, we have been a market leader through product leadership.  We consistently have had better products than our competitors.  Our facilitation course is considered one of the best in the industry.  Our consulting skills course has become a product leader among very few competitors.

In the future, we are seeking to combine product leadership with a customer intimacy focus.  q       While in the past we have responded to customer’s request for services, in the future, we want to be proactively discovering these needs.  q       In the past we have had considerable repeat business from client call-ins; in the future, we want to be proactively seeking those additional opportunities.  q       In the past we have received referrals, we want to be proactively seeking these. 

Expanding our sales force, along with changes to various company policies and procedures, are the catalysts for this change to a customer intimacy focus.