The Maixner Group is a consulting shop based in Portland, Oregon, that helps companies identify growth strategies and improve their sales tactics. Kathy Maixner fries big fi sh and little. One of the big fi sh added $21 million to its annual revenue as a result of hooking up with Maixner. One of the small ones, Inner Gate Acu
punc ture (profi led at the close of this chapter), learned how to establish a solid business management footing under a clinical practice whose growth was outpacing its control systems.
We’re interested in Maixner because the coaching techniques she has developed over her career line up so well with the learning principles described in this book. In short, Maixner sees her role as helping the client dig past the symptoms of a problem to discover its root causes, and then to generate possible solutions and play out the implications of different strategies before committing to them.
Make It Stick ê 241
Maixner told us: “If you hand people the solution, they don’t need to explore how you got to that solution. If they generate the solution, then they’re the ones who are traveling down that road. Should they go left or right? We discuss the options.”11
Maixner’s years of experience working with clients in many different fi elds helps her see around corners, where the hazards lie. She often uses role- playing to simulate problems, getting her clients to generate solutions, try them out, get feedback, and practice what works. In other words, she introduces the diffi culties that make the learning stronger and more accurately refl ect what the client will encounter out in the marketplace.
Farmers Insurance
Corporate sales training can be complicated. Typically, it’s about corporate culture, beliefs and behavior, and learning to promote and protect the brand. It’s also technical, learning the features and advantages of the products. And it’s partly strategic, learning about the target market and how to generate prospects and make sales. At Farmers Insurance, whose principal sales force is a cadre of about fourteen thousand exclusive in-de pen dent agents, training must also equip the company’s reps to become successful as entrepreneurs, building and managing their own agency.
Farmers sells property and casualty policies and investment products like annuities and mutual funds to the tune of about $20 billion a year. Describing the full scope of their training could fi ll volumes, but we’ll focus on the way Farmers brings new agents on board, training them in the four areas of sales, marketing systems, business planning, and advocacy of the brand. The company’s new-agent training is an excellent example of interleaving the learning and practice of different
Make It Stick ê 242
but related topics so that each adds meaning to the other, broadening and deepening competency.
The company recruits upward of two thousand new agents annually. Many leave traditional jobs elsewhere, drawn to the rewards of running their own business and the opportunity to represent an established product line. Newly appointed agents arrive at one of two training campuses for an intensive weeklong program of learning exercises that spiral upward in sophistication.
At the start, participants are given a pile of magazines, scissors, and marking pens with which to illustrate on poster-board what being a successful Farmers agent would look like to them personally, fi ve years down the road. For some, the poster shows fancy houses and cars. For others, kids are being sent to college and aging parents are being cared for. The point is simple: if your defi nition of success requires, say, $250,000
a year in revenues and twenty- fi ve hundred policies in force, we can help you work backward to set the metrics for where you need to be in four years, in three years, and even three months from now. The image on the poster shows where you’re headed, the metrics are your road map, and the skills that are learned over the coming days and months are the tools that will enable you to make the journey.
From here, the week is not so much about teaching from the top down— there are no PowerPoint lectures as such— but about learning from the bottom up, as in: “What knowledge and skills do I need in order to succeed?”
The learning unfolds through a series of exercises that cycle through the principal topics of sales, marketing systems, business planning, and advocacy of the company’s values and its brands— returning time and again to each, requiring that participants recall what they have learned earlier and apply it in a new, enlarged context.
Make It Stick ê 243
For example, when participants fi rst arrive, they’re assigned to a red, blue, or green group. The red group is instructed to go meet people in the room. The blue group is instructed to go learn three things about somebody in the room. The green group is instructed to ask another member of the class about his or her family, prior occupation, favorite forms of recreation, and what he or she enjoys most. When the class reconvenes, they share what they have learned about others, and it is quickly evident that the green group, which had a structure for talking to others, learned much more than did their peers.
When talking about sales later in the week the question comes up, what’s an effective way to learn about a prospective customer? Somebody will recall the initial get- acquainted exercise that proved so fruitful: asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment. That icebreaker now morphs into a handy tool for getting to know a prospective client and it gets an acronym: FORE.
Throughout the week the four principal training topics are repeatedly touched on, a point is made, and the exercises shift to related questions. In one session, participants brainstorm what kinds of marketing and development strategies might generate the fl ow of leads they need in order to meet sales targets. An effective sales and marketing system has a structure called 5- 4- 3- 2- 1. Five new business marketing initiatives every month, four cross- marketing and four retention programs in place, three appointments scheduled every day, two appointments kept (prospects often have to reschedule), one new customer sold on average two policies per sale. At twenty- two working days a month, that’s about fi ve hundred new policies in a year, making twenty- fi ve hundred over the fi ve- year horizon of the agent’s vision.
Practice is a central learning strategy. For example, they practice how to respond to a sales lead. Trying to sell the
Make It Stick ê 244
company’s products is how they learn about selling, but it’s also how they learn about the products they’re selling— not by sitting in front of PowerPoint slides gazing at long lists of product features. You be the agent, I’ll be the customer. Then we’ll switch.
Interwoven with these exercises are others that help the new agents learn about the company’s history, what it stands for, and the value of its products in people’s lives, for instance through stories of how it has helped people recover from catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.
Given the emphasis on marketing and the limited resources new agents have to invest, how does an agent determine which strategies will pay? The question goes out: What’s a reasonable return to expect from a direct mail campaign? The agents mull it over and hazard guesses. Usually, one or more of the agents will have had direct- mail marketing experience and offer the sobering answer: returns are closer to 1 percent than the 50
percent many had guessed.
Once you turn up a lead, how do you discover needs he or she has that the company’s products can meet? They return to the handy acronym FORE. Now, the habit of asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment becomes something even more potent than a tool for getting acquainted.
It provides an opening into four of the most important realms of a prospect’s life where insurance and fi nancial products can help that person protect his or her assets and achieve his or her fi nancial goals. At each pivot from one subject back to another, understanding deepens, and new skills take form.
In this way, through generation, spaced practice, and interleaving of the essential core curriculum, with an eye always to the fi ve- year vision and road map, new agents learn what they need to do, and how, in order to thrive as a part of the Farmers Insurance family.
Make It Stick ê 245
Jiffy Lube
If you don’t expect innovations in training to spring from your local ser vice garage, Jiffy Lube may surprise you. An integrated suite of educational courses under the felicitous name Jiffy Lube University is helping the company’s franchisees win customers, reduce employee turnover, broaden their ser vice offer-ings, and boost sales.
Jiffy Lube is a network of more than two thousand service centers in the United States and Canada that provide oil changes, tire rotation, and other automotive ser vices. Although the company is a subsidiary of Shell Oil Company, every outlet is owned and operated by an in de pen dent franchisee, who hires employees to serve customers.
The rapid- oil- change business, like most others, has had to adjust to changes in the marketplace and advances in technology. Synthetic lubricants have made oil changes less frequent, and because cars have become more complicated, garage employees need higher levels of training to understand diag-nostic codes and provide appropriate ser vices.
No employee may work on a customer’s car until he or she has been certifi ed as profi cient. For this, they enter Jiffy Lube University, a Web- based learning platform. Certifi cation starts with interactive e-learning, with frequent quizzing and feedback to learn what a par tic u lar job entails and how it’s to be performed. When employees score 80 percent or better on an exam, they are eligible to begin training on the job, practicing new skills by following a written guide that breaks each service activity into its component steps. The steps may number as many as thirty and are performed as a part of a team, often involving call and response (for example, between a technician working from the top side of an engine and another un-derneath). A supervisor coaches the employee and rates his or
Make It Stick ê 246
her per for mance on each step. When the technician demonstrates mastery, certifi cation is recorded in his or her permanent fi le, signed by the supervisor. Technicians must recertify every two years to keep their mastery up to snuff and adapt to operational and technical changes. Higher- level jobs for advanced ser vices like brake repair or running engine diagnos-tics are trained in the same manner.
The e-learning and on- the- job training are active learning strategies that incorporate various forms of quizzing, feedback, and spaced and interleaved practice. All progress is displayed by computer on a virtual “dashboard” that provides an individualized learning plan, enabling an employee to track his or her per for mance, focus on skills that need to be raised, and monitor his or her progress against the company’s completion schedule. Jiffy Lube employees are typically eigh teen to twenty- fi ve years old and fi lling their fi rst job. As a technician is certifi ed in one job, he or she begins training in another, until he or she has trained in all store positions, including management.
Ken Barber, Jiffy Lube International’s manager of learning and development, says training has to be engaging in order to hold employees’ attention. At the time we spoke, Barber was putting the fi nishing touches on a computer- based simulation game for company managers called “A Day in the Life of a Store Manager.” The ser vice center manager is confronted with various challenges and is required to select among a range of possible strategies for resolving them. The manager’s choices determine how the game unfolds, providing feedback and the opportunity to strive for better outcomes, sharpening decision-making skill.
In the six years since Jiffy Lube University was launched, it has received many accolades from the training profession and earned accreditation by the American Council on Education.
Make It Stick ê 247
Employees who progress through training in all job certifi cations can enroll at a postsecondary institution with seven hours of college credit under their belts. Since the program’s beginning, employee turnover has dropped and customer satisfaction has increased.
“For most employees of a Jiffy Lube franchisee, this is a way into the workforce, and the training curriculum helps them to continue to grow and expand their knowledge,” Barber says. “It helps them fi nd a path to success.”12
Andersen Windows and Doors
At Andersen Windows and Doors, a culture of continuous improvement turns learning on its head: the production workers teach the managers how to make the plant more effi cient.
This story is a little different from the others in this chapter in two respects. It’s partly about creating a learning culture in the workplace, and partly about empowering employees to use what they learn to change the workplace. By encouraging employees to identify problems on the job and propose improvements, the company is supporting one of the most powerful learning techniques we have discussed, wrestling to solve a problem.
A good place to focus is on the company’s division called Renewal by Andersen, which produces replacement windows of all types and sizes: double- hung, casement, gliding, picture windows, and specialty windows in nontraditional shapes.
At Renewal by Andersen’s facility in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, their double- hung production line employs thirty- six people during an eight- hour shift that is divided into three work cells, one for sash fabrication, another for frame fabrication, and one for fi nal assembly. Each work cell has four work stations and is led by a crew leader who is responsible for
Make It Stick ê 248
safety, quality, cost, and delivery within that cell. Workers change jobs every two hours to minimize repetitive stress injuries and broaden cross- training. Like interleaving the practice of two or more different but related topics, frequent switch-ing between jobs builds an understanding of the integrated pro cess for which their unit is responsible and equips workers to respond more broadly to unexpected events that arise.
