A financial services industry leader set course to aggressively pursue emerging markets to build marketshare. Their most successful and largest revenue-producing sales group was charged with leading this endeavor. However, its leadership team had rebuffed the need to be significantly more inclusive to better understand and support the needs of their clients and target markets. Prior efforts to develop marketshare in emerging markets had only low to moderate success. The HRC was charged to create a mindset and strategy shift among the leaders within only 3 half-day sessions over a course of 9 months. And, this group was well-known for only a 10-minute attention span. An interesting challenge!
We recognized we needed to immediately engage these high-performing sales leaders in a high-energy and competitive event to keep their attention the first ½ day to commence the crucial mindset shift. Through a team-based, experiential exercise, we proved to the group they had substantial room to grow interpersonally and in revenue. It worked perfectly. With their appetites whetted, we gave them research assignments before session 2. The results of their research provided the data for a business case to pursue the emerging markets with greater gusto. Session 2 was focused on advanced inclusion and collaboration understandings and behavioral skills to support their success and provide them an assignment prior to Session 3… to design new products and services to support this new customer group. Session 3 included invited, high volume customers who also had an interest in emerging markets. The attending customers were excited about this firm’s unique innovations and provided our client with additional marketshare on the spot. As an additional result, the sales organization won the Chairman’s Award that year for the progress they made through this initiative.