Sales Enablement PRO Awards 2021: Driving Sales Proficiency and Agility at JLL

Congratulations to Sales Enablement PRO Award winner Sean Huston from JLL. Learn more about the Agility award winning initiative below.

What was the challenge you were facing?

Sean Huston: My name is Sean Huston and I lead sales enablement for corporate solutions at JLL Diversified, a real estate company here based in Chicago with global reach. I’ve been with the company about a year and a half. Previous to that, I’ve been a management consultant, always focused on helping companies grow, and supporting global companies as they may try to sell more, sell better and win more business. The previous state of sales training within jail corporate solutions was get somebody on a webinar, have a bit of a talking head in a few slides to go through, this is what we want you to sell. This is how we want you to sell whether it was in-person or over a webinar. That was the primary way of training people.

And as we know, as sales enablement professionals, there’s more effective ways to get people to learn and engage in training and trial out what they’re learning. So the new training program is focused on prospecting. We call it the opportunity generation training program, and we were really in a situation where we have a big brand in our industry. We have a lot of deals that come at us. And so our sales force isn’t really used to getting out there and prospecting and generating a lot of new opportunities. And to get them to try to change their behavior and develop new ways of growing our business, we needed to develop this program.

What was the process of developing this initiative?

SH: The process was really aligning with our sales leadership, as well as our global CRO on a flipped learning model. A flipped learning model and it can be really valuable in our virtual environment that we’re working on right now, which is you learn actually going into your class, you learn online, you learn by reading, you do a lot of your learning and your reading and of new material prior to getting in the room, whether it’s virtual or in-person. When you get in that room, you have a brief review of concepts. But the core use of that time is discussion. And it’s to discuss how you would apply these concepts, how you have applied these concepts and really learning from each other. And then out of a flipped learning environment, you generally have activities and followup that you’re going to do. We had developed a multidimensional training program leveraging this flipped learning model and used it to train our users on how to prospect.

What are some of the business results and impact as a result of your efforts?

SH: When as many businesses faced, we didn’t know what was going to happen to our part of the real estate world when the pandemic hit and through a program like this and the heroic efforts of our sales team, that we were able to number one, start out by growing our pipeline. Number two, bringing in more new logos than we ever had before. And three, ultimately achieve our sales goals for the year. All as an outcome of this, and it’s proven that the model works and we intend to use it for other programs, not just prospecting, but knowing products that we’re rolling out as well as other sales skills and other things, we want our people to learn, having them spend that time offline and then using our time together, most valuable rollout look like a pilot program. We actually, because it was an unproven model that was new to most people in our organization, we had a sales leader who wanted to try it. He asked for some volunteers and we had a good group to do the initial session. It actually went very well. We had a lot of engagement. We learned a few things.

We learned what we’d expect people to do through the sessions, had to shorten Smith sessions, that kind of thing, but prove the model there and then roll that out and did four more additions here in the Americas. Another five or so additions in Europe and similar in Asia-Pac. So starting with that pilot model, we rolled it out globally beyond the results and uptick in our pipeline and results. Last year, what we’ve seen already this year is a real focus on our sales leaders and sales managers to have more of a focus on coaching their people on the techniques that we’re using and really building on some of those successes we had last year. And we expected to really snowball. So that and number two, really proving the concept and being able to use this model for other learnings and other priorities in our business.

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