Voting Devices Enhance Sherwin-Williams Sales, Training Meetings
Paint manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams has embraced a new technology tool that is improving the effectiveness and productivity of its sales and training meetings.
Youngstown, Ohio-based Turning Technologies' TurningPoint provides interactive attendee feedback through wireless voting devices that upload responses into a slide in the presentation. The system can either be bought or rented and can be adjusted to fit any meeting size. The responses can be integrated with PowerPoint presentations.
"We were just thinking about doing something creative, something different," said Chuck Mengel, training manager for Sherwin-Williams' sales excellence team, when the company brought in TurningPoint to help make the most of four district manager conferences of 80 to 100 people.
"We did it and it was a big hit," Mengel said. The company then decided to use the technology for its national sales meeting, consisting of approximately 1,900 salespeople. The questions posed throughout the training seminar related to a sales representative's job functions and the company's sales process, providing "a check-and-balance process to see where their knowledge is, where they can improve," Mengel said.
Much like a trivia game, attendees see a question and four possible answers on the screen. The moderator reads the question and answers and starts a timer. Attendees press the correct response on their credit-card-sized remote, which is sent to the main computer through a transmitter set up in the room. Answers are tabulated and are then displayed on screen when time is up. After a period of time, the system tabulates the teams' correct responses and their performance compared to other teams.
"It's not them sitting and listening for 90 minutes. It's interactive, it's engaging, it's challenging, it's fun. People had little competitions among the teams to see who could perform better," Mengel said.
Turning Technologies provided technicians to assist with setting up and helping with troubleshooting during the program.
"We thought, instead of force-feeding them all of this information, we would let them know there would be a quiz. Folks are competitive by nature, so they would prepare for it," according to Mengel. Salespeople reviewed their information beforehand to make sure they were comfortable with the information being covered and would be able to perform well for their team during the training.
"The feedback was very good from a content standpoint as well as from an engagement standpoint. They liked it, so they are going to enjoy it so much more," he said.
Senior executives, many of whom were watching the seminar, also could see where their representatives did well and where they struggled, so they knew where to coach them to see improvement.