I Dread Trainings. But This Last One Was Actually Really Good!

TBI held a training workshop recently at the XChange Solution Provider conference in Los Angeles. It ran for more than five hours. By the end of the marathon session, everyone in the room had participated. And then when we were finished, not a single person left without coming up and thanking us. "This was not what I was expecting," we heard repeatedly. "This was the best training I have ever had," said many.

Does that sound like a technology training to you?

Even with PowerPoint slides, everyone managed to stay awake and off their email.

Having 70 carriers and 140 employees, TBI has a lot of trainings. The carriers come in and beat us over the head with product slide after product slide. We get in a big conference room, get fed pizza, and the monologue goes on and on as the slides are flipped. Everyone walks out retaining about 10% of what they saw because they were checking emails on their phones.

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The XChange workshop was different. It was fun, at times exciting. The reason?

We talked to each person in the room about how to improve their business. We researched every attendee prior to the training and trained on how important it is to research your clients beforehand. We spoke about overcoming objections, finding the right decision-maker, and other generic sales techniques that can be applied to telecom and any other business. It was exciting getting people in the group to role-play and give examples.

The last 15 minutes, I talked about the value of network services dovetailing with VARs and how nice residual commissions are.

I see over and over that all partners—no matter what their business is—would like help. We offer our recruiting and HR services to our partners, write employee handbooks, etc.

We have invested our marketing resources in some of our partners. Some partners want to learn best practices from our VP of finance.

I guess the point to this blog is that all of the people you work with are looking to better themselves, including your customers. If you can offer value like that, you will become a strategic partner to them.

You can reach Ken Mercer at [email protected].

Sponsored by Telecom Brokerage, Inc.