Amazon Web Services won the Global Learning! 100 Award for the third time for their global OBAM program that provides AWS sellers with an Amazonian way to sell. That Amazon selling process starts with the customer's needs and works backward to define the correct solution, all while using a common language, process and methodology.

The development of OBAM has spanned multiple years and continues to evolve to meet the needs of the fast moving cloud market. It strives to define success through their customers' eyes, based on their unique priorities and target outcomes.

This year, a new component was tested called Momentum. The aim of this addition was to provide spaced reinforcement for the disciplines previously taught in OBAM. This reinforcement series runs in burst sessions every other week, and is unique to every team. This allows AWS sellers to fine tune their talent by focusing on specifically targeted skills. Momentum, in turn, provides a continuous trickle of desired behavior reinforcement.

Outcome-Based Account Management [OBAM] itself, is the process, tools, competencies, and dialogue architecture for initiating and solidifying Amazon Web Services' customer-obsessed relationships, fixated on the journey of transforming the seller-customer engagement into a lifelong strategic relationship. The program includes a pre-call, pre-work, a live one-day collaborative training day session, 3 post-workshop coaching calls, and an on-demand OBAM playbook.

The program has been delivered globally to thousands of sellers in all geographies and continues to receive high satisfaction scores. As was evident from Amazon's 2017 annual report, Amazon Web Services continues to be a major contributor to Amazon's growth. An excerpt from that 2017 annual report stated this quote about AWS:

It's exciting to see Amazon Web Services, a $20 billion revenue run rate business, accelerate its already healthy growth. AWS has also accelerated its pace of innovation - especially in new areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and serverless computing. In 2017, AWS announced more than 1,400 significant services and features, including Amazon SageMaker, which radically changes the accessibility and ease of use for everyday developers to build sophisticated machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers are also using a broad range of AWS machine learning services, with active users increasing more than 250 percent in the last year, spurred by the broad adoption of Amazon SageMaker. And in November, we held our sixth re:Invent conference with more than 40,000 attendees and over 60,000 streaming participants.

T-Mobile USA Telesales received the Global Learning! 100 Award for their comprehensive effort to unify all telesales call centers and team members in how they interact both internally and externally with customers to communicate T-Mobile's Un-Carrier vision. At the start of the initiative, T-Mobile USA found that while the telesales team was performing and meeting its revenue targets, the organization was highly fragmented with call centers each using different processes, tools, management models and training approaches.

Knowing this was not a sustainable approach, T-Mobile asked BCI to deliver an initial pilot engagement of Pathways to Growth. The intended outcome was to change the sales management and coaching approach used by managers in six key T-Mobile call centers for over 1200 telesales agents. As the Pathways to Growth engagement launched, the project grew to include a comprehensive and highly customized sales training curriculum, media campaign and rollout. Branding focused on promoting the Un-Carrier culture with a theme to "Unleash, Empower and Excel U".

The teams worked together to build a series of e-learning preparation modules, on-site and virtual learning classes, coaching modules, reinforcement eLearning and multimedia solutions, promotions and more. The goal was cultural change, excitement and a focus on working cohesively as one unified T-Mobile to delivery an outstanding customer experience.

American Heart Association wanted to establish a unified fundraising process and culture across their organization for both Volunteer-centric and Direct groups. Besides this unified fundraising process, AHA also wanted to support their staff in articulating the mission, impact, and programs of the AHA, as well as reach critical thresholds in areas of revenue and health goals. These business outcomes led to the creation of the "Building Powerful Partnerships" program.

Some of the learning objectives that needed to be achieved were:

• Demonstrate ability to lead conversations that will offer value to partners and volunteers by focusing on their needs;
• Apply best practices for creating rapport, earning trust, and aligning the AHA message and mission with partner and volunteer needs;
• Discover and practice proven ways to leverage LinkedIn for establishing credibility and making connections with prospective partners and volunteers;
• Define four typical human behavior styles useful for enhancing conversations with partners, volunteers, and team members;
• Identify and practice proven strategies for each behavior style resulting in better communication and increased trust;
• Describe and practice the five-stage SMART engagement model to plan and execute high-impact conversations with partners and volunteers;
• Apply the Powerful Partner Research process during the engagement process with prospective partners and volunteers
• Practice the 5-step HEART Conversation process; and
• Evaluate and develop plans for transitioning relationships to the next level of stewardship and involvement.

The program exceeded all expectations and helped American Heart Association achieve their critical goals, which in turn helped them continue their wonderful work at the non-profit.

Safran is an international high-technology group, operating in the aircraft propulsion and equipment, space and defense markets.

Safran has a global presence, with more than 58,000 employees worldwide, and logged sales of 16.5 billion euros in 2017. Comprising a number of companies, Safran holds, alone or in partnership, world or European leadership positions in its markets. Safran undertakes extensive Research & Development programs to keep pace with its fast-evolving markets, including expenditures of 1.4 billion euros in 2017.

In February 2018, Safran took control of Zodiac Aerospace, significantly expanding its aircraft equipment activities. Zodiac Aerospace has 32,500 employees and generated sales of 5.1 billion euros for its fiscal year ended August 31, 2017.

SAFRAN COMPANIES

• SAFRAN AERO BOOSTERS
• SAFRAN AIRCRAFT ENGINES
• SAFRAN CERAMICS
• SAFRAN CORPORATE VENTURES
• SAFRAN ELECTRONICS & DEFENSE
• SAFRAN HELICOPTER ENGINES
• SAFRAN LANDING SYSTEMS
• SAFRAN NACELLES
• SAFRAN TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS
• SAFRAN POWER UNITS
• SAFRAN ELECTRICAL & POWER
• SAFRAN TEST CELLS
• ZODIAC AEROSPACE

THE ROLE OF THE TALENT MANAGEMENT TEAM

The role of the Talent Management team is to act as a strategic partner and advisor to the Safran North American affiliates on zone initiatives, talent development, and training for entry level, emerging leaders, and high potential employees. Some of the key initiatives that the team addresses are as follows:

• Strategically align training and development focus areas to the business objectives;
• Address the growing need for regulatory, security, and developmental training programs
• Efficiently integrate new hires;
• Support the transformation of Safran University in the business sectors across North and South America; and
• Collaborate with HR Leadership across the Safran Group to further develop talent through initiatives and programs such as the Mentorship program.

THE ACHIEVEMENT

Of all of the above challenges, perhaps the one that would cause eyebrows to rise would be the creation of a multi-company, multi-country Mentorship program. The challenge of a mentorship program within one company can be a daunting task. You have to consider similar work, generational differences, department cultures and a host of other factors that would lead to a successful mentoring exchange.

Now take that complexity and multiply it by 13 companies, and several countries, and you can appreciate the achievement of the Talent Management team. But they didn't stop there. They took the opportunity to really go both ways with the mentoring. The obvious is "how we do things at Safran." The not so obvious might be a mentee talking about social media to a mentor from a different generation; explaining cross company topics; and even matching language and cultural differences across companies.

This was not only a challenging assignment worthy of a 100-page whitepaper, it evolves the mentor/mentee roles to create a two-way exchange of valuable knowledge and skills. In BCI's opinion this challenges the possibilities when it comes to mentorship programs. It establishes the high-water mark for these types of programs in the future. And as you'll see from the testimonials, this program will become the harbinger of what's possible for companies to consider when it comes to cultural change.

We think that this achievement is worthy of the highest consideration, and we think that Elearning! magazine should ask the Safran team to share their approach, so that other companies can see how to take on a project of this magnitude.

Amkor is the world's leading supplier of outsourced semiconductor interconnect services and is a trusted partner for most of the world's leading semiconductor suppliers. Faced with strong market and price pressure from a key low-price competitor in China, Amkor decided to hit back and hit back hard. The goal was to move revenues up by 7.5% and top the $4 Billion mark in total revenues.

To attempt this growth feat in the midst of eroding markets was a bold move. It required the upskilling and reinvigoration of the global sales team. This bold objective, when other market players were losing ground to China because of unfavorable trade conditions, was launched at their global Sales Kick-Off meeting. The objective of the upskilling was to change the competitive landscape to one based on successful customer outcomes, versus competing on price alone. So global initiatives around customer outcome selling spread from the United States, to the UK, to EMEA, APAC and the rest of the Americas. Following that refocusing on customer outcomes was an upskilling in negotiation and presentation skills. There were over 75 workshops conducted around the world, along with coaching and other reinforcement to ensure that the training took hold.

The success of the upskilling effort showed a steady upward movement as momentum built around the world. And by the end of 2017, they had regained their competitive superiority with revenues topping $4.186 Billion. But the momentum hasn't stopped. That revitalization of pipelines has thrown their whole sales organization into an upward spiral of activity and growth that shows no signs of weakening.

Baker Communications is proud to have played a role in their spectacular success, and now with new tariffs expecting to put their US operations back on stable footing against China, the future for Amkor is as bright as ever.

Mitel Communications powers more than 2 billion connections every day. Mitel Communications helps businesses connect, collaborate and take care of their customers. Their global reach includes over 2,500 channel partners and regional headquarters around the globe. Yet despite that global reach and footprint, the company has a local touch that reaches 70 million end users every day and has earned them a leadership position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications.

This whole training initiative stemmed from a 1% goal. Although it may seem strange to focus on a goal of 1% in a world of double-digit growth, the 1% goal was a phenomenal performance objective. It would signal that they were successful in getting "back to basics" when it came to managing the selling process throughout its many stages. It would also mean that the team had achieved its pipeline and forecast tracking objectives and that proper business planning could be accomplished using the numbers being produced by Sales.

With strong support from the Mitel Sales Operations Team, a plan was created and executed to transform the sales management systems at Mitel. It was time to get back to basics, even though there continues to be a huge market shift occurring in their base between on-site seats and the shift to cloud-based business models. So, the trick was to accelerate the development of their global sales leadership team to embrace the disciplines laid out by the Pathways to Growth methodology that BCI had developed.

The ability to scale the development of the field sales management team on driving the disciplines of a weekly forecast commit along with the monthly funnel review processes has made a huge difference in being able to execute to the commitments to the business.

In the last quarter of 2017 the entire sales organization came within 1% of their forecast, which successfully re-anchored the sales teams in the discipline of sales management. Mitel credits that forecast performance improvement to getting back to the basics with the disciplines that are part of the Pathways to Growth methodology. Mitel is living proof of the Baker Communications tagline, "world-class performance never happens by accident."