Anyone Can Get Sales Training.

Sales Transformation Is A Lot Harder To Come By.

When senior sales executive Philippe Lavie started KeyRoad Enterprises in 2002, our President set out to create a different kind of sales training company. There were plenty of sales training organizations but very few, if any, that could use sales to transform the company’s growth trajectory completely. He wasn’t interested in working with people who wanted to throw a training class at improving the sales team. He wanted to create a sales training company fully committed to making business development a long-term element of the entire culture.

It’s a mission of excellence, integrity, performance and transformation. And those virtues form everything we live by and do at KeyRoad Enterprises today to further the most advanced customer-focused sales techniques in the industry.

Over the years, KeyRoad has brought extensive insights to organizations across the globe such as TIBCO Software, Bishop-Wisecarver, OpenTV, Ilog, AB Applied BioSystems, Torani, VantaggioHR, 24/Seven and many more. Prior to setting up KeyRoad, Philippe worked at Daisy Systems, Sun Microsystems, Onlink Technologies and the Portland Trailblazers.

10 Minutes With Philippe Lavie

Philippe, as you’re diagnosing a company’s challenges, what’s one of the most revealing issues you discover during this process?

It pertains to what I call “sales truths,” which is a conversation between the seller and multiple buyer personas. To help a salesperson have more of an intelligent discussion around and about diagnosing what’s going on, they need to be able to talk to a specific buyer’s persona.

How does a sales team have a powerful and thought-provoking conversation with such a buyer persona or personas? Especially since we have to assume that we’re approaching the potential buyer from a place where they don’t yet trust the seller.

At KeyRoad, we create a conversational guide based on the persona or personas, which includes the top three or four goals/challenges/needs that he or she has that your company can address. The closer to understanding those areas by using this guide, the more we can have a very productive conversation. As the seller, we have to pull data, information and values out of the buyer.

Being a sales training company, we teach teams to spend as much time in and go as deep as possible during this phase because the more we can uncover, the easier it will be to prescribe solutions based on what the buyer gives us. Based on that, we can measure how well the seller understands whether the buyer is serious about buying and wants something you actually have to sell.

How does KeyRoad help to bring marketing and sales together by focusing on the sales silo?

First, it’s important to define who does what consistently in order to keep the machine of business development humming along like clockwork. For example, I think all forms of brand content have to be owned by marketing. Sales cannot own it. Marketing has its own metrics and milestones that have to be respected too.

On the other hand, we find that marketing tends to use a type of language that is great for the brand, but when it comes to very drilled down, specific verbiage that resonates with the prospective buyer, we need to ensure that verbal detail is owned by sales. Plus, sales needs its own very defined metrics to focus on what we regularly monitor, such as the number of calls and top-line revenue generation. When sales is clear on the language to use for each stage and its own unique metrics for success, many “worlds” within the organization are brought together.

KeyRoad is the one sales training company that can help your sales team with those definitions, verbiage and goals immensely. A highly focused sales team pays dividends outside of the sales department for sure. After all, as a sales transformation company, we want everyone in the business to understand how sales behaviors align with stages of the buyer’s journey.