A General Manager’s Perspective on Corporate Education

At Impact, one of our core values is focused around continued education for both new and tenured employees. The main source of much of this learning is from the Impact Leadership Institute, run by our Professional Development team. While all new Sales employees take a full week of courses focused around prospecting, appointments and deals, senior members of the team are also encouraged to take the course to get a new perspective on modern sales techniques. Their hope is to share the benefits of employee training and development with people from across all departments within the company.

Hear from Rick Ray, who has been at Impact for close to 20 years and recently attended one of ILI’s latest training sessions, to see what he took away to incorporate into his own position. He shares what he was able to take away from the training, and why it’s important for managers to take introductory courses to better help their teams.

This video features Rick Ray, Wisconsin General Sales Manager/Partner in Brookfield, WI.

Get Educated About ILI

You can read more about what the Impact Leadership Institute teaches, their differentiators and some of the major achievements on their webpage, and take some time to familiarize yourself with some of their online resources:

Expert Talk: Ashley Carnes on Corporate Professional Development
Inaugural Impact Sales Summit: Leadership Interviews
Inaugural Impact Sales Summit: Highlights
Inside the C-Suite | Reducing Churn in Sales with Corporate Education
Inside the C-Suite | Creating a Culture for Learning

Video Transcript

Recently, I went through an ILI course called Fundamentals, which is largely based on hunting and discovery skills. It was great. I mean, the experience was, it kind of brought me back as a rookie rep almost 20 years ago, which was very neat to kind of put myself back in those shoes at this point in my career. 

I would say the structure of the ILI training is probably one of the keys. You know, for example, there’s two key components. One is, most of the training starts with what’s called an FYI, which is simply, as it sounds, for your information. And really what that is it’s trying to get out the content and the purpose of what we’re trying to teach you. But I think most importantly, the second key is that we get into a CTA, which is considered a call to action. So it’s a combination of learning great content, but immediately you have to get into role play groups and actually put that content into execution, which is critical. 

They talk a lot about key indicators, right, key indicators could mean a lot of things, but the key indicators for your territory, key indicators for the type of customer that we’re going after. So it allowed me to actually put together a project where I’m trying to help identify who are the target audiences of each of my different territories, because I have 23 territories that I help manage. And quite frankly, they’re all different. 

My experience, I would say, ILI, is a lot different than a lot of the other trainers that I’ve seen. And I think the biggest differentiator is it’s not death by PowerPoint, right? It’s very common to get into a training session and probably very capable trainers, but they rely on the content too much. I think what ILI does differently, I may have mentioned earlier, is giving content, putting the content into execution immediately because the best training in the world means nothing if you can’t actually take it away and execute something from it.