PSI Announces FOCIS® Contest Winners

Productive Strategies is pleased to announce the winners of the Second Annual FOCIS® Contest for graduates of PSI’s FOCIS® Selling Workshops. Winners submitted their success stories highlighting their use of FOCIS® in securing major sales opportunities or as support of FOCIS® best practices within their company during 2007.

And the winners are…

1st Place:  Stephen Hoskins , Sr. Account Executive, Chicago Tribune Interactive, $500 prize

2nd Place:  Scott Moore , Sales AIR-serv Group, North America, $300 prize

3rd Place:  Rob Engelman , CEO, Engelman Management Group, $200 prize

Each of the winners used the skills and knowledge from FOCIS® training to produce significant inroads in business development. Their stories, below, illustrate how their investment in consultative selling skills and building their sales process impacted their results.

Stephen Hoskins  took first place for his work in selling an online campaign to Kohler Plumbing that delivered 100% sales increase for Kohler for their trade sales to Chicago area plumbers. Strong FOCIS® discovery skills enabled Hoskins to understand Kohler’s objectives in driving traffic from all of their conventional media sources to their website. “They wanted to make a priority that TV, Radio, Newspaper and Internet ads all interrelate and direct users to Kohler.com,” according to Hoskins.

Hoskins also identified the problems that had occurred with prior online advertising programs for Kohler. This helped the Tribune craft a solution that was in complete alignment with the customer’s objectives.

Hoskins took advantage of Productive Strategies’ policy of allowing alumni of the FOCIS® Selling workshops to re-take the course at no charge in “open” session with other companies. Both years in which Hoskins took the course he was awarded the highest sales achievement award given by Tribune Companies, the Campbell award. The first time he won it in 2004 he was selling advertising in the Tribune Newspapers. This time, following a promotion into the Interactive Group, he won the award for online advertising sales. Congratulations to Stephen Hoskins for winning the Tribune’s Campbell award, our 2007 FOCIS® award and achieving 2007 sales to all customers of almost two million dollars.

Scott Moore  won second place for his achievement of signing up an 18-location C-store/gas station chain in North Carolina. Moore is a former North Carolina policeman whose first sales training ever was the FOCIS® Selling workshops he attended in early 2007. The sale to this chain of stores required persuasion under two scenarios: that they switch to an AIR-serv paid air program in stations where they currently offered free air and switch to AIR-serv’s program where the station currently offered pay-per-use company-owned compressors.

Moore reported that some of the challenges and implications he found by listening to the customer involved the down time of the machines. He helped the prospect realize that the cost of parts for their present equipment and the cost of the manpower to repair their machines was more than they had realized. He also helped them calculate the cost of not having machines with vaults to protect the cash; the cost of their free air program; and the cost of not having meters to create an audit trail to verify income receipts.

In addition to using the FOCIS® plan to identify the needs and challenges and, ultimately, the solution for this sale, Moore reported the benefits of using FOCIS® throughout his first year of selling:

“I truly feel that the FOCIS® training has aided me in many ways. First, it is much easier to become the consultant or the advisor of my product than being a salesman. This makes selling easy! Also, I feel for me that FOCIS® is a tool on my tool belt to allow me to listen and find the needs of my customers to better serve their needs.”

Rob Engelman  took third place for his sale to an out-of-town prospect.

After completing the third of four FOCIS® Training workshops Engelman received an e-mail inquiry from a small business owner in New Jersey.

Engelman knew that this was not the size of prospect that warranted a trip out to New Jersey without a commitment to do business already in place. With all his FOCIS® notes in hand, he made the phone call. Through the discovery questions he had developed within the workshops Engelman was able to uncover about $3 million in lost opportunity the prospect was experiencing with its present communications program. He also discovered that his solution would produce an additional $3 million in revenue, as estimated by the prospect with the discovery skills Engelman honed during his FOCIS® training.

In one 45-minute phone conversation Engelman helped the prospect identify six million ($) reasons to hire his firm for the consulting assignment. His success was an example of one of our core beliefs: slow down the sales process to speed up the sales cycle.

We were pleased that entries to this year’s contest were up 20% over 2006. Congratulations to all our contest entrants for using their FOCIS® skills successfully.

To be eligible to enter our 2008 contest you must be a graduate of the FOCIS® Selling Workshop program.