Sales Coaching Program from CA Learning Wins Multiple Industry Awards

ISLANDIA, N.Y.– CA Learning’s Sales Readiness team has won two awards for its Sales Manager Coaching program—the Bersin & Associates 2008 Learning Leaders Award for Operational Excellence and the 2008 Team Excellence award from the Suncoast Chapters of the American Society of Training and Development and International Society for Performance Improvement.

2008 Learning Leaders Award

Based on detailed criteria compiled over years of research, the Bersin & Associates Learning Leaders Program recognizes organizations which have developed and implemented effective and efficient approaches to employee learning and development resulting in significant business improvement.

“Organizations have an ongoing need for operational programs that train people in the nuts and bolts of their business,” said Josh Bersin, president, Bersin & Associates. “But for learning to be successful—particularly in today’s economy—these programs must have clear business drivers and visible business return. CA’s continuous learning program for time-constrained sales managers is a model for how coaching can drive high levels of impact.”

Like many companies, a critical success factor for CA is the continuous increase of new sales contracts. In 2006, CA changed its sales model to enable teams to build customer relationships through an enterprise IT management strategy and to create long-term business partnerships.

Along with this new business model, sales managers were faced with challenges typical to the IT industry, including team member attrition, finding the time for coaching, and job satisfaction scores that were in line with industry norms.

Based on the cumulative results of research and analyses with a small group of sales operations experts, CA Learning’s Sales Readiness team recommended, designed, and implemented a comprehensive and continuous blended learning and performance support program that mapped to sales managers’ specific needs and constraints, preferred learning methods, and corporate culture.

“It takes a team effort to build and deploy a program that positively impacts employee satisfaction and attrition rates. To produce such positive results, we collaborated with sales leadership, sales ops, and HR teams throughout the entire process,” says Dan Braunm, vice president, Global Learning, Sales Readiness at CA.

As a bottom line result, quality coaching by sales managers has contributed to increased performance of the direct sales force, improved CA employee satisfaction survey results, and decreased Sales Manager and Account Director attrition.

CA joins other 2008 Learning Leaders such as Sun Microsystems, Boeing, Textron, Cisco and the United States Air Force. To see the full report which provides an in-depth look at the best practices of the 26 winners, click Learning Leaders 2008: Award Winners and download a complimentary copy.

Team Excellence Award

The 2008 ASTD/ISPI regional OPAL award for Team Excellence recognizes the accomplishments of an individual or organization that has delivered outstanding performance and learning through the use of teams. Criteria for this award include direct contributions to organizational results, dynamic use of teams to achieve success, as well as specific measures regarding the way that lessons learned from the program were incorporated into the organization for future application and improvement.

“The extraordinary measurement results of this program exemplify the level of quality applied in every phase of its lifecycle, and provide the Sales Readiness Organization with quantitative proof points on where success has been achieved—as well as where we may target future offerings to best support the success of Sales Managers at CA,” said Meagan Hewig Gregorczyk, program manager of Global Sales Coaching Initiatives at CA.