#CTW16 Recap: Driving Behavior Change in a World of Unreliable Managers

Sixty six days—that’s how long it takes to build better habits in a sales force, according to United Rentals’ Shelley Robins, citing a manager impact study. This fundamental training challenge is not necessarily an issue because sales managers are unreliable; it’s an issue because driving adoption in the field is an imperative.

Often times, as Robins noted, knowing how well you’re doing here comes down to answering two questions: How much are the skills being used, and how much do they help? Adoption doesn’t happen by accident, and there are five leading indicators that Robins and Tom Jones, also of United Rentals, keep in mind when assessing how they’re doing:

Behavior changes
Value articulation skills
Negotiation skills
Branch manager reinforcement efforts
Coaching and reinforcement

Here are a two tips offered by Robins and Jones for staying strong across some of these crucial adoption indictors:

Small improvements = wins. Focus on certain topics of training at a time. For example, drill down on key negotiations skills to keep your team sharp on their skills, such as setting high targets or expanding the range of reason.


Provide a proof of mastery step for certification, giving managers skills check lists they can use to ensure reps are fluent across the most important selling skills and concepts.

United Rentals’ Tom Jones presents in the Transformation track at #CTW16.

Raising the Bar at CUNA Mutual

Terry Cogburn, director, organization capability at CUNA Mutual, had a simple question she wanted to answer: What if reps could apply more of the key selling techniques that our top performers were using regularly?

Three years after asking that question, CUNA was driving consistent results by striving toward that goal, to the tune of 25 percent larger pipelines, 20 percent larger deals, and a 23 percent increase in goal attainment.

A crucial aspect of this behavior change transformation? In the rollout, CUNA Mutual trained sales managers first, because they had to find a way to help managers diagnose and coach. While deal coaching was a strength of many sales managers, skills coaching was not something many were comfortable with. Another key element of the process, Cogburn said, was establishing a coaching academy to build reinforcement and make sure the behavior changes they’d worked hard to realize remained sticky in the long run.

CUNA Mutual’s Terry Cogburn