Sales and Account Management Academy

Vantage built a comprehensive sales and account management academy for a large pharma’s 250-member account management group. The account management academy is comprised of numerous courses focused on building customer engagement and other soft skills. It includes courses such as Building Your Account Leadership Brand, Influence and Stakeholder Management, Negotiation, Difficult Customer Conversations, Executive Engagement, and Strategic Thinking. Each course is open enrollment; leaders nominate their people to take courses in accordance with their individual development plans. Account managers also can self-select courses to build their competencies and further their performance and professional development. 

Vantage undertook a comprehensive reevaluation and assessment of a global Fortune 20 medical device company’s sales model. The assessment identified a need for significant competency development in areas of customer negotiation, competitive selling, virtual customer engagement, and strategic sales and accountterritory business planning. Vantage worked closely with its client to develop a core team of 20 trainers trained in Vantage’s methodology and frameworks in these critical competency areas. After building out advanced selling skills courses in these areas, the client’s trainers have rolled out programs to the sales force globally, to be delivered, in the course of a multi-year effort, to all 12,000 representatives. 

To support a global pharmaceutical services company’s strategic goal—to be differentiated on the basis of excellence in customer service—Vantage designed and led a customer-centricity transformation initiative involving dozens of virtual training sessions for over 1000 individuals across executive leadership, sales, project management, and operations. This program reached not only the professionals who touch customers daily, but those working in factories and laboratories in support of customers, in order to build an overall customer-first mindset. The highly scenario-based program enabled participants to wrestle with difficult customer situations and align on the best responses when tradeoffs are required. The program created a vision and common mindset for working with customers across international sites from Australia and China to Europe and North America.

With margins squeezed by fierce competition and increasingly powerful procurement organizations, a global cardiovascular leader engaged Vantage to help it fundamentally shift the way its sales organization approached customer negotiations. Salespeople needed to negotiate for value—to develop cross-divisional solutions, craft more creative contract terms, handle tough tactics from counterparts, and align and sell to hospital administration, procurement, and clinical personnel. After conducting a negotiation capability diagnostic assessment with a cross-section of sales managers, Vantage rolled out a customized “negotiation toolbox” for sales teams, integrated with the sales process, and a series of intensive, 2-day negotiation training workshops for the entire salesforce, customized for VP-level, through key account managers, to sales representatives. These workshops (and follow-up training) instilled a common negotiation vocabulary and toolset, a collaborative mindset, and new culture focused on long-term contracts with customers that create significant value for both sides. Subsequent Vantage trainings for non-client facing functions further cemented the new negotiation, communication, and collaboration practices into their culture.