People, data, and tools. That’s one powerful combination. Which is why it’s the value proposition of CROSSMARK. It succinctly represents what makes us successful as a Sales Agency. And our recent launch of Accelerator, a revolutionary data and analytics platform that sets a new standard for Sales Agency advanced analytics, is a terrific illustration of putting our proposition into action.
As a tool, Accelerator is astounding: faster, more intuitive, and predictive. It’s unlike anything before it and completely built from the ground up to support the work a Sales Agency performs. It’s ability to ingest and make sense of enormous amounts of data is quite impressive. (Just ask our employees and clients!)
While these are noteworthy technological innovations, it’s the people aspect of our value proposition that will continue to determine our success. After all, any tool is only as good as the person using it. And we can all agree, achieving client success takes more than good analysis. The analysis must lead to a solution that is easy to explain, agree upon, and drive step-change growth.
So how do you make that happen? Investing in your people.
At CROSSMARK we believe everyone, from our senior leaders to the managers in the markets, needs to be using a consistent method that yields the best results. For that reason, during our Accelerator rollout plan, we made a purposeful and significant commitment to ensure consistency and revitalize efficiency. We call this way of training, working, and shared capabilities The CROSSMARK Way.
The CROSSMARK Way is our north star, a set of professional standards for how our sales and insights functions work together to fulfill our promise of smarter selling and faster growth for our clients/brands. The CROSSMARK Way ensures that the very best methods of selling, uncovering insights, category management, and communication are universally applied by all Sales and Insights professionals within the organization. By creating and reinforcing one way, we drive performance, efficiency, consistency, and ultimately, better outcomes while we continue to invest in the skill development of our team.
Instituting The CROSSMARK Way starts with training over 400 associates in a broad curriculum of skills, including: selling, data analysis, insights generation, category management, and presentation development. This is a baseline of knowledge that we give to both Sales and Insights so that we speak the same language and have a better understanding of what each other needs to drive growth.
Combined with “click” training for our new Accelerator tool, each CROSSMARK associate invested more than 30 hours in skill development in the first half of 2021. That’s nearly a complete work week of dedicated, strategic learning, and workshopping!
Ask anyone who has invested in training and they will tell you that the key performance indicators are not the volume of training, but retention and adoption. Therefore, to ensure “stickiness” for the training concepts, we added a CROSSMARK Way Validation Process to our performance management system. This meant each associate must not only complete the training regimen…but also demonstrate that they are using all of the concepts in their work.
And if you didn’t think we were serious about training yet, we go a step further. We’ve created a formal process linking training to annual reviews. Not only does this ensure our associates are armed to deliver the best for our clients/brands, but it also underscores just how important the CROSSMARK Way is to our continued success.
All too often, training has been a casualty of cost cutting, which can become a vicious circle. At CROSSMARK, we have a different view. Training is both a worthy investment and an efficiency play. A well-trained organization coordinates better, works more swiftly, makes fewer mistakes, and drives better business results. By pairing more data and better tools with exceptionally trained people, CROSSMARK is able to deliver on our promise of smarter selling and faster growth.
We’re proud to make investments that matter to our people, clients, brands, and the industry—now and into the future. And that standard is what you can expect at CROSSMARK.
Written by: Jami McDermid, President, Sales Agency
