Empowering Peak Performance

Designing Peak Performance Sales Training

The Public Broadcasting System

PBS is a collection of over 300 totally independent stations, all of which have their own management teams, budgets and broadcast footprints.  Although they all have unique environments, they also have many cultural and business elements in common such as their core programming, competitive landscapes, and mission to sell high quality, unique programming genres under the most trusted and admired brand in the U.S.

Challenge:

The Development Department of PBS needed to design a training curriculum and approach to enable its corporate support group to sell sponsorships for PBS programs. Considering that sales prospects are usually driven by ratings, the sales team needed training that not only taught PBS’ history and its unique regulatory requirements, but how the value of PBS sponsorship transcended traditional advertising. In short, the training had to equip the sales team to effectively make the business case for PBS sponsorship.

Solution:

PBS enlisted Kevin’s team to develop a comprehensive training program.   Designing a program named the Corporate Support Performance Initiative (CSPI), Kevin and his team focused on training in five core areas:  1] Sales process design to create the ideal sales process for all stations to follow; 2] Knowledge training to educate how PBS differs from other media and its benefits – as part of an effective value statement; 3] Face-to-face selling skills to demonstrate effective and proven sales techniques; 4] Training for PBS’ internal trainers which were handpicked sales managers; and 5] Sales coaching for managers.

Result:

Kevin’s training program has become the foundation of the PBS development team’s sales training. The CSPI has been conducted for hundreds of PBS sales people at all PBS Development meetings and in regional settings every year since 2004. Today PBS still consults with our team to review its role plays, to review new cases for training, and to perform ongoing training to internal PBS trainers.