JPI Media

We helped JPI Media create a 'coaching culture' for their sales teams

JPI Media is one of the largest national, regional and local multimedia organisations in the UK.
About

We helped JPI Media create a 'coaching culture' for their sales teams

400
UK
Solutions provided:
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JPI Media is one of the largest national, regional and local multimedia organisations in the UK. They provide news and information to their communities through their portfolio of hundreds of publications and websites, employing over 2000 people across multiple locations in the UK.

The Challenge

Learning insights on mobile

To recommend and provide customer solutions in the fiercely competitive advertising market, JPI Media’s (JPI) 400 salespeople needed to be highly skilled and well managed. JPI wanted to reconsider their approach to developing the team’s skillset for three main reasons:

  • They used a system of monitoring calls and field visits with a view to giving feedback and improving quality. The approach was highly subjective and it became a tick box exercise that had little impact. They had a manual, paper-driven process and no easy method to produce reports that could be used for feedback;
  • from 2017, JPI reduced their field sales force from c.320 to 120. Customer behaviours have changed dramatically over the last decade, with many preferring to engage by phone or online. They needed to manage this change and re-skill their sales force;
  • JPI wanted to motivate the team and provide a genuine opportunity to develop, helping their sales force understand and recognise best practice sales conversations. A new coaching culture would be the key to enable this.

SalesExcellence monitor

The solution

The initiative centred on development, marginal gains and embedding a coaching culture in the organisation. All enabled by Learning Pool’s and Meta Capability’s cutting edge technology.

Before launch, Meta Capability spent time defining best practice skills, behaviour and mind-set attributes for all salespeople, creating animated bite-sized videos that matched each major attribute. They also produced a robust communication plan and developed explainers for the entire company about the programme.

It was crucial that commercial leadership were committed to the approach. To encourage this support, time was spent with senior leaders on observations and feedback, coaching specialists were enlisted to develop coaching skills and all leaders completed a course, which covered the psychology of the new approach and how to use the technology and interpret the data.

“The transformation in the capability and performance of the commercial team has been profound. The technology we introduced moved us from manual subjective paper based assessments, with only face-to-face training as the solution, to objective analysis of capability via any smart device linking to bite-sized learning/videos specifically targeted at development needs.
There is total ownership by the Commercial Leaders rather than L&D having to push initiatives, and we are well on the way to establishing a continuous performance management and coaching culture.
The transformation of our commercial capability is evidenced through an average of 10% improvement in revenue per head across the desk and field sales, created by L&D through this technological solution”.

Ian Johnston
Group HR Director

Results

Learning and development is now owned and driven by the commercial team and key to success has been how commercial leadership has been driving the programme. They now enjoy a continuous performance management and coaching culture throughout the entire sales team.

The platform creates a personal learning journey and enables salespeople to learn on the go. Using advanced technology, it also suggests further development opportunities and provides relevant video training to upskill. Other highlights include:

  • Revenue per head in telesales increased by 12% and in field sales by 8%
  • Average order value increased by 24% in telesales and 13% in field sales
  • In 2018 the Advertising revenue trajectory went up by 4% in a challenging market
  • Attrition declined by 23% in telesales and early attrition (in the first year) by 40%
  • Average revenue of new joiners increased from £79,787 to £164,928 in the first 6 months

Due to this success, JPI is now rolling out the same approach across their 800 journalists, implementing the Editorial Excellence approach as a key foundation of transformation of their newsrooms. So far, the pilots have proven to be a great success.

JPI Media elearning dashboard administration

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