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Bram Lagrou: Most business leaders think that communication is a soft skill, but my experience says differently. It's often one of the fastest ways to increase sales, build leadership, and culture.
This is yet another episode of the Commercial Leader Podcast. Welcome.
What I'm going to unpack today is a case study. This is about a national health insurance company who is actually one of the leaders in their field boasting the highest rates of customer satisfaction and member engagement. And with that being said, we're going to start off with how this came to life.
There's a certain manager in an organization that I had the pleasure of working with, and as this manager moved into the health insurance space, she decided that, as she was working with her call center [00:01:00] team, that it was time to bring me in. The idea was to ensure that the conversations that the call center would have with existing and new members would be of good service to the clients, but also allow them to extract more commercial value out of those conversations.
So in long story. Call center receives calls in. They're all about the products that the organization has on offer to support their members. They then handle those conversations, advise the clients after they had a good thorough assessment, and then from then onwards help them to make a decision now.
So they're selling basically premium health insurance products. These people didn't need more hype. What they needed was more awareness, better adaptability, and more influence with the client conversations they had.
So we basically started where commercial conversations were happening every day. Here's what happened in a very short space of time. [00:02:00] Even top performers, those that were converting most of those conversations into closed business, were selling with 20 to 25 and even 30% higher than average within weeks of our program.
And this was only a program with a bit of training and a little bit of coaching, so it wasn't really taking a lot of time of hours, but it shared the tools, the methodology that we call Communication Mastery, and we help them to apply it in a meaningful way for a call center environment, selling premium health insurance products.
The team, which was about nine people at the time, were starting to understand themselves better. They were reading other people better over the phone. So based on the voice, the tonality, the words they were using. They also adapted to communication style to better suit the clients. Trust was built faster.
They connected in a more meaningful way for the client. They also influenced those [00:03:00] clients without becoming pushy or robotic, which is always the challenge when you using scripts or sales methodologies and the likes. That it becomes a little bit too stale. We wanted to preserve flexibility.
People bought more easily because they felt understood by the team, and so that was a really groundbreaking result. Top performers were scoring 20 to 25% more business within weeks following the training.
The interesting bit here to notice is that it wasn't just the weaker performers that were doing better. Everybody did, including those that were already leading the team with the results. Even strong people lifted. And that really is important because when top performers improve, you know that you're not just fixing weaknesses, what you're doing is you're raising the ceiling for the entire team.
At this point in time, the CEO accepted to have a meeting with me. As we [00:04:00] started having a conversation about what we did, and what this methodology can do for other departments in an organization, he started to see that Communication Mastery would not necessarily be only a commercial or a sales specific angle.
He saw a wider leadership opportunity. He decided to bring me in and engage me for more leadership development, starting with the SLT, the senior leadership team. We not just gave him the framework in terms of training, but we also included some group follow up coaching sessions, as well as some one-on-one work with every single leader.
That way training could become more practically embedded and we could really put it to test in certain situations that were meaningful for the leader at the point in time, with the conversations and opportunities and challenges they had on their plate.
This is basically a nine month program that we then rolled out. Following the senior executive team, we [00:05:00] also involved the middle management layer, which was almost 20 people, looking after everything from compliance, audit, marketing, sales, customer service, data analytics as well. All of these people came through the same program after the SLT with the same idea to do some in-depth work on their one-on-one conversations, difficult conversations, the way they, participate or chair meetings, how they provided feedback, how they created alignment, and how to perform as a leader under pressure, because let's face it: the more senior we become, the more we have on our plate, the more stressed we can be.
There's also Board requirements. Then there's certain people that are on annual leave or key people that decide to move on, and so we have all these challenges to deal with as a leader. Everything started to go better as a result of this program. Training wasn't just creating insights, it was also the coaching that helped people [00:06:00] actually live it.
And once again, the CEO had a very interesting way to refer to this and basically said the work that we had been doing with the SLT and the middle managers was "connecting the head with the heart". It was about understanding oneself and other people better, but also making sure that we would come from a good space within so that when stress would be there and where more pressure would be on the senior leaders and the middle managers, that they would be able to weather the storm and be able to be more emotional intelligent as a leader, channel their energy, and decide better on what course of action they follow rather than react impulsively. So responding wisely rather than reacting. And this is definitely what we started to see that was happening even at the Town Hall meetings that called in all of the people across the business in the head office.
Even those dramatically [00:07:00] changed in terms of the format, in terms of how it was run to create more engagement across the wider employee base. And this is interesting because when you look around in your organization and you look at how group discussions and town hall meetings typically make certain people step forward and contribute and participate and engage and share their feedback and raise questions. There's always a group of people that seem to be less active. They're volunteering less of their opinion, they're withholding what they truly think. And for some of us, we're seeing that there's two camps inside the group or within the team.
But this is all predictable. Who will behave more vocally and who will be sitting on the back bench, so to speak? That's at least how we can perceive it. Long story short here is: this organization [00:08:00] understood and learned that in order for all of the people to become active, there need to be a re-engineered format of that town hall meeting. For example: how people were prepared; whether or not information would be shared in the lead up to the event; whether specific questions would be raised earlier in the piece rather than in the meeting itself. Also, after the meeting, how things were followed up on; what sort of opportunities were given to come back on a certain topic or question. All of this was engineered by design to ensure that all team members would contribute, participate, and be fully engaged. That was a game changer also for this particular health insurance company. People were starting to talk about Communication Mastery with their staff. All those senior leaders, all the middle managers.
Communication Mastery was getting a lot of traction for them. Their team members noticed. Their [00:09:00] team members would ask questions about it and whether or not they could participate in the same training program. The company came back to me and said, Hey, we'd like to roll this out to other employees. And so another 30 odd people put up their hand and came through a condensed version of Communication Mastery. You can see that this was not just training anymore.
It had actually become part of the way the business wanted to communicate internally and also externally with their customers and even stakeholders like unions and the likes. This was very dramatic in how it unpacked.
Some of the words that the CEO himself shared with me afterwards.
"We invested in this program, not so we can label or pigeonhole behaviors rather to better understand each other and how to connect and communicate meaningfully. Investing in how we communicate will pay dividends for you and your [00:10:00] business because let's face it: when things don't go well, communication is always at the heart as to why!"
Why is this quote so important? The bigger business lesson here that we can take from it is that communication affects multiple things. One: sales is where we started from. Two: trust amongst people in the same team, and also trust between us and our clients or external stake stakeholders.
Three: leadership, how we show up as a leader, how we engage our people, how we create buy-in versus sabotage or criticism.
How we raise accountability across the board because if we can communicate in a way that people appreciate and how it lands well, people take more ownership and that drives also commercial value in an organization.
Culture: as more and more leaders walk the talk and their staff members respond [00:11:00] positively, then behavior starts shaping for the better, which then also affects and shapes culture.
And last but not least, execution. There's always a few things that stand in the way of good execution. So anytime an organization goes out to the employees and says, this is what we would like you to do. Here's how we would like you to support us. This is the bigger picture. This is where we going. This is why we do it. All of this, obviously we do this as an attempt to create buy-in, but the challenge is that the execution bit will be in direct proportion to the actual engagement that we create.
Too often, is the communication done in a poorly designed manner that might suit the people that communicated outwards but where it's not necessarily landing well. Communication Mastery means that we can read our audience, whether that audience is one person or [00:12:00] multiple, and that we appeal to, empathize with and resonate to the needs and wants of that particular audience.
It's about delivering the key messages in a way that they say, you know what? That makes sense to me. I feel good about it. I'll happily support it, and I actually want to drive this.
And that is where the disconnect too often happens, right? Communication is where commercial performance and human performance meet.
In closing, if you lead a business and you want better sales conversations, stronger leadership and better communication across your teams, this is exactly the kind of work we do here at Lagrou Partners. We'll be pleased to have a confidential conversation with you about what we can do for you. Thank you again for joining in on the Commercial Leader Podcast. My name is Bram Lagrou.
Look forward to seeing you again next time.
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