“We have to make sure our sales force is asking the right questions and that they have the ability—and confidence—to call on clients at any level within an organization. They have to have the skills to sell in a price-competitive world.”
Name: John Isenberg
Title/Firm: Vice president, Sales and Marketing, Western Extralite
Employees: 35 account managers over six regions
Industry: Electrical products distributor
Territory: Missouri, Kansas and parts of Illinois
Objective: To improve listening and questioning skills in order to enhance selling in a price-competitive world
You might say Western Extralite is in John Isenberg’s blood. His grandfather started the business in 1938, and his brother and he share leadership of the company today. Western provides lighting and electrical distribution, as well as voice and data products, to a wide variety of clients. Their products have expanded from their grandparents’ single “Extralite” reflector light bulb to more than 1,300 items in stock today.
To make sure those products are moving, John oversees the efforts of 35 account managers in six regions in Kansas, Missouri and parts of Illinois. It’s a task that demands constant attention and leadership.
“We have to make sure our sales force is asking the right questions and that they have the ability—and confidence—to call on clients at any level within an organization,” John said. “They have to have the skills to sell in a price-competitive world.”
To help him achieve those goals, John hired the Coffman Group in 2001.
Before they began working with the account managers, however, Casey Coffman convinced John that top management needed to buy into the process and learn the skills themselves so that they could better coach the sales force.
“With their help we not only learned the skills, we also created hiring and selling processes, and we received coaching at the management levels,” John explained. “They developed our leadership and goal-setting abilities, and that’s helped our organization grow."
As a result, John says sales training has become an integral part of their culture. Instead of sending sales representatives to off-site seminars and seeing short-lived results, Western now has a customized, ongoing coaching and program that incorporates sales training into their monthly territory sales meetings. Topics for the meetings are pre-selected by regional sales managers to assure they are pertinent to the challenges at hand. Coffman staff presents additional training sessions and individual coaching, as requested.
John says these Coffman-inspired techniques have helped him—and his company—grow.
“They pushed me and coached me to be a better leader, which has been an important ingredient in our continued success,” John explained. “We’ve had quantifiable growth in market share since we engaged them. It’s a testimony to their value that we continue to use their services after more than six years.”
