The background
A Sales Team of 16 people needed to enhance their skills for client meetings. While their ability to create good proposals and solutions was not in question, they were encountering challenges when understanding and handling the dynamics between people during meetings.
This training followed a previous voice workshop from Resonance, which had been very well-received, and was designed to build the group’s communication skills further.
The approach
Through consultation with Sales Director, Steve Gardner and HR Director, Carol Atkinson, we decided to support the team by offering new techniques followed by an opportunity to role-play the challenges in realistic scenarios.
The objectives were:
- To give the delegates techniques to relax and release physical tension;
- To allow them to discover how to gage other people’s non-verbal behaviour;
- To enable them to use their physical presence to build rapport;
- To enable them to influence others through their body-language.
This was a highly interactive two-day workshop. The delegates worked in small groups, pairs (and occasionally individually) to explore how consciously using posture, breathing, movement, space and timing could create the impact they wanted on others.
The first day focused on techniques to help the delegates prepare themselves for dealing with high-pressure situations and to ensure that they were choosing the impact they made on others. There were exercises and games for enabling the delegates to read and play group dynamics.
The second day was given over to scenarios (specially designed by Resonance in collaboration with Steve Gardner) in which the delegates took turns to play themselves and various individuals from client organizations. Each delegate received feedback from the trainer and the rest of the group.
The outcome
The group decided to work more collaboratively by structuring the sharing of information about clients, and to mentor more junior members of the team specifically in the area of engaging clients and presenting oneself as an expert partner for the client.
