The Situation

The public sector group at Xerox Corporation specializes in selling to government entities. This includes state and local governments, federal government agencies, and public school districts. A tool was needed to assist salespeople in developing the skills needed to support this market.

The Solution

For the group calling on K-12 school districts, we created SOLE - School Online Learning Experience. SOLE is a web-based learning program that helps salespeople develop skills for understanding the business issues of their school district accounts. Learners work towards conducting interviews with two school officials and developing solutions based on their business objectives. To prepare for the interviews, the learner conducts research on the Internet (to gain general industry knowledge) and within a fictitious school district website. While the program is largely self-directed, we prepared a manager's guide that outlines a process for coaching the sales person through the learning. We also created a facilitators guide with a process for leading the program in a group seminar session.

Learning Objectives for SOLE:

• Learn a process for conducting executive calls

• Learn the important questions to answer about the marketplace and the account

• Find the most current and complete sources of information to answer those questions

• Prepare for and conduct interviews with school district executives in a way that provides business value to those executives

• Use the insights gained in the research and interviews to spot high-gain opportunities

• Managers learn a coaching process for helping their reps acquire these skills

On the next six pages you will see example screens for SOLE. These are not fully functional web pages, but rather pictures of the actual program pages.

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