The program, combining classroom and virtual training, equipped the team with essential negotiation, listening, and customer-centric sales skills and knowledge, leading to improved performance and enhanced customer relationships, as well as a stronger alignment with strategic goals.
Ontex is a leading international personal hygiene group that develops high-quality products for baby care, feminine care and adult incontinence care. The company is a leading supplier of retail brands to healthcare institutions.
Upgrading sales capabilities
With its Serenity brand, Ontex Italy has a strong presence in the Italian adult care market. The country is served by a sales team of area and regional managers, who in turn manage larger teams of field agents and product specialists. The Italian sales team is a heterogeneous group of professionals, with varying levels of experience. Ontex Italy felt the need to provide the sales team with a unified experience to enhance team spirit, and at the same time improving their sales and negotiation skills.
We found it useful to offer a sales program to team members of all experience levels.
says Raffaella Ria, Sales Director Home Delivery and Nursing Homes at Ontex Italy
More experienced team members may need a refresher from their often outdated ways of thinking, while younger team members may still lack the necessary experience and knowledge. It’s important for both groups to have a shared understanding of the right way to approach customer interactions and navigate complex sales scenarios. Bridging this gap ensures that all team members, regardless of experience level, are aligned in delivering consistent, value-driven solutions that meet customer needs effectively.
Complex negotiations
The team is responsible for offering adult care products to the Local Healthcare Authorities, hospitals and nursing home markets. In Italy, regions manage public healthcare services, which includes purchasing and distributing medical supplies for people who live at home, often through public buying organizations or procurement agencies.
Addressing these buyer groups involves a complex selling process, which requires answering public tenders, working with decision-making units, and handling challenging sales conversations. In such negotiations, simply having a good product is typically not enough. Instead, sales teams need to delve deeper into the customer’s needs and initiate conversations from that standpoint.
Engaging these buyer groups requires a strategic sales approach, involving formal responses, navigating multi-level decision makers, and managing complex conversations. In these interactions, offering a quality product alone is often insufficient; sales teams need to focus on understanding customer needs and tailoring their approach accordingly.
Especially with the younger team members, we noticed a lack of assertiveness and confidence.
says Raffaella Ria
There was a hesitation to take the sales conversation to higher management with real decision-making power. This often resulted in missed opportunities to influence key stakeholders and drive the conversation towards meaningful outcomes. By building their confidence and assertiveness, we aim to empower them to engage decisively with top-level decision-makers and position our solutions more effectively.
Classroom and virtual training
Based on previous successful experiences, Ontex Italy sought the help of Perpetos to upgrade the team’s sales skills and knowledge. Perpetos proposed a blend of classroom-based and virtual training sessions – covering both theoretical and practical content – over a period of several months. The program was led by Perpetos trainer Eliséo Manfron, an ICF (International Coaching Federation) certified coach.
The program participants were refreshed on a broad range of topics, including complex negotiations, handling difficult situations, asking powerful questions, and active listening. All these techniques were key to shifting the team’s approach from price-based selling to brand selling, moving from competing purely on cost to emphasizing the unique value, reputation, and emotional connection that the brand provides to customers.
Exchanging experiences
An important component of the virtual training sessions was a technique called ‘intervision’, also known as Codéveloppement Professionnel. This involves small groups of participants with similar backgrounds exchanging experiences under the guidance of a facilitator. The goal after the training is to reuse the knowledge gained and learn from the experience of colleagues.
We simulated sales conversations and used role-playing to really get into the heads of our customers. These techniques helped us understand how customer-centric conversations work and how to initiate negotiations based on customer needs. In fact, this approach aligns with how we aim to handle customer relations at Ontex. We don’t want to impose ourselves in an aggressive way. Instead, we strive to understand our customers first and then achieve a win-win outcome.
Raffaella explains
Raffaella and Perpetos received enthusiastic feedback from the team, who managed to apply the knowledge from the training sessions quite fast in real-life conversations.
We immediately noticed that our team members had become more confident and proactive, taking on a stronger position in sales conversations.
says Raffaella
But most importantly, the Perpetos program helped to open our minds and increase awareness of our own sales approach, and it provided the tools and mindset to elevate our sales conversations in the long term.
