How MSC Built a Sales Coaching and Reinforcement Machine

You’ve heard the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall. Strangely, the same directions apply to success in selling: Practice, practice, practice.

No matter how enthusiastic the seller response from a workshop or kickoff, they won’t truly adopt the skills and behaviors that lead to higher performance without reinforcement. And to build a culture that supports skill adoption, you need to not just teach skills but foster an approach that shows your team the benefits of change.

Challengers recognize this as a three-part framework we call the Skill, the Will, and the Hill:

• The Skill Pinpoint the Challenger skills that sellers need most
• The Will Alleviate resistance and drive sellers to take action in modifying their behavior
• The Hill Create an environment that allows for experimentation and learning

For MSC Industrial Supply, a Challenger client, the Hill turned out to be the key that unlocked the Skill and the Will among its sellers.

MSC supports its customers in the manufacturing industry by helping them lower costs, drive productivity, and eliminate waste in their manufacturing operations (MRO).

For years MSC sellers relied on relationships, offering fast delivery of its millions of products. But MSC’s leadership realized that, to stay competitive, they needed to shift their approach from selling parts shipped “just in time” to proactively providing Insights and other items of value.

As they adopted Challenger, they faced skepticism from a deeply tenured salesforce, numbering in the thousands, who weren’t too sure about changing how they approached sales — in some cases, for decades.

By building Challenger into the sales process, including coaching conversations, MSC signaled to its salesforce that these skills were central to their success. They also landed on an important realization: in using Challenger, MSC’s sellers delivered a better experience to their customers.

MSC uses a customer model known as MRO Go as a framework for continuous improvement. This aligned well to Challenger’s approach to account growth, which shows that accounts grow not from stellar service but from providing unique perspectives designed to grow business throughout the lifetime of an account.

As they saw this resonate with customers, sales and enablement leaders at MSC asked themselves: how do we create this same kind of continuous improvement model within our sales team?

And so, the Sales Mastery Program was born.

Externally, MSC’s sellers use the same framework to guide customers to continuous improvement, but often customize their solutions (because no two customers are alike!).

Changing seller behavior requires a similar approach. So as they rolled Challenger out across their teams, they customized development plans for each seller, aligned to four different levels.

As MSC’s sellers and sales managers move through the Sales Mastery Program, they complete capstone activities and assessments to move onto the next level — requiring sellers to reinforce the skills they learn in workshops beyond on-the-job activities.

This approach also opened benefits to managers and coaches. To successfully reinforce Challenger, managers need to understand not just what to coach, but how to coach. By adopting the Sales Mastery Program, MSC’s coaches were able to better understand Challenger concepts themselves, track seller skills development, and zero in on the skills their sellers needed to focus on developing. They also measured their own ability to coach and pinpointed areas of improvement and development for themselves.

Through the development of this program, MSC’s focus resulted in sustained skills adoption across their three selling divisions: Business Development, National Accounts, and Field Sales. It aligned their leadership and improved capacity for sales managers.

Which all sounds great … but what really matters is results.

Over the course of the first two years into the Sales Mastery Program, MSC reported:

• Improved speed and efficiency in its sales cycle
• Increased pipeline velocity
• Increase in sellers contributing to overall growth
• And a significant boost in win rates

And all of this — the very results that sales leaders dream of achieving — comes from their commitment to strengthening coaching and building a program designed to reinforce the unique selling skills and behaviors that set Challengers apart.