Does Your “Sales Force” Know Your Business Plan?

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

Last time I wrote about the need for a true business plan approach to running your internal training function. Since training departments rely on funds from the rest of the company, almost a form of external financing, I suggested that most departments could benefit from crafting business plans similar to the ones small, independent training companies take to their creditors and investors.

Here’s one more lesson from small training companies: In a successful small business, everyone in the company knows the business plan. Every employee is aware of the goals, the target market, the key strategies that drive the company.

Why? Because the “sales force” in a small company is everybody. Every time someone inside the company interacts with someone outside the company, that is an opportunity to promote the business, to build relationships that help them reach their goals.

Your training department doesn’t have a dedicated band of “sales representatives” who go out and beat the bushes to drum up customers. Your department head does a lot of the formal selling to the leadership team, especially during annual budget discussions.

But informal selling can make a huge difference to the support you enjoy across the company. And broad recognition of the benefits you bring to the company is built up—or weakened—with every interaction between a member of your training department and anyone else in the company.

Unfortunately, in too many training departments, employees leave the “heavy thinking” to management; they just “do their jobs.” They see winning budget battles, getting access to resources, building cooperation among other company functions they serve as something the department leader does.

A clear business plan can be a huge help in turning all of your staff into your sales force:

• Your plan should clearly identify the relationship-building, or “selling,” function as a part of every single employee’s job.
• A formal business plan should be shared with everyone in the training department, with a strong message that everyone on the staff is expected to be able to articulate the key elements of that plan.
• For the best results, especially if this is a new approach for you, give the staff some explicit training in responding to questions, sharing the plan, and recognizing opportunities to promote the plan. In other words, train your staff to respond to conversations and interactions in new ways, routinely weaving department messages for their “customers” into their communications with the rest of the company.

The power of your business plan can be simply, and accurately, gauged by the number of people who routinely express its key components. If only the department head knows what the business plan is, you are throwing away countless opportunities to “build a brand” that it is more resistant to downsizing and budget attacks. Just as importantly, a well respected “internal brand” opens new opportunities, developing a more sympathetic audience within your organization when you want to try something new.

If all the staff in your department regularly include elements they learned from the business plan in their working conversations with others, you have a much larger and more effective “sales force” working for you.

And when you have delivered your key messages so relentlessly, so consistently, that people in other departments start using your favorite phrases from the business plan to describe your training function, you know you have the support to maximize your contribution to your organization’s success.