Field force training

Field Force Optimization

Len Vanderhulst, Mettler-Toledo: Generating ROI on Human Capital, from Field Service East 2013

Video transcript:

Investing in the human capital is the topic I have today and this actually just came out in our company newsletter just before coming out here which I thought was pretty appropriate. As a company, we had invested in 14,000 trainings globally across our company and that include classroom, e-learning. 3300 of those were service training, 5600 of those trainings were sales training and 42 were professional training. So it was kind of nice to see that we are investing in it. Quite heavily it looks like.

So to give you a little bit of background about Mettler-Toledo, I'm not sure how many of you heard of Mettler-Toledo most of it. Everyone knows of Toledo Scales or seen Toledo Scales in grocery stores or at the fair when I guess you weight, that big dial scale that still works that's 50 some odd years old is one of our products. I forgot who it was that said you only got 30-year-old product that still run; we still have some of those as well.

We are the largest provider of weighing instrumentation for laboratories, manufacturing, and food retailing. You won't find us in bathroom scales or doctor's offices that they don't really want to pay a lot of money for a scale like that. We have a worldwide presence, a little over 12,000 employees and just under 2.4 billion US dollars in sales.

We're a global manufacturing and sales organization. We service and sell in 38 countries, of the 55 employees that are involved in sales, marketing, and service and support about 2500 of those are technicians. We have R&D sites across the US, Europe and in Japan and in Asia. And we do direct service in selling in all the countries that are in blue on the map there. So it's quite a large globally spread service organization.

We provide solutions across the customer value chain and so this is sort of depicting a customer that we would typically see that has R&D facilities, quality control, for scale up and production, for pharmaceuticals and so on, we're in that space as well. Production solutions such as bench scales, counting scales, packaging solutions, so check weighing, measuring boxes that are going down filling line, packet transportation, logistics solutions. So we sell to UPS, FedEx, DHL, all the major companies that way and we weigh boxes, dimension the boxes that go through those systems and pallets that go on the trucks. And some of those trucks end up in grocery stores where we also have solutions in our food retailing. It's the other place, a lot of people see us the deli counter scales; check out scales and so on.

So I will skip through this a lot of this product stuffs. What we have things for weighing down to micrograms and on our transportation end; we have things that go up to weigh trucks and trains up to kilotons, so pretty much everything in between. And then in our fresh food management it's the—like I said there are counter scales, and deli scales and so on.

So what brought us to this point, I think it was Jennifer that mentioned earlier today in her talk, the 2009 crisis came along and we started to look at, how do we grow our service business despite of what's going on. We really start to look internally what can we change, what can we do differently and so we came up with this mandate that we needed to have better service technicians, better service team leaders and better service managers to help get us through that to drive the service business. And we had to weave these things together so that it also gave us a career path for people to move through the organization. As we have before, we just took technicians, we made them a service team leader, we made service team leader into service manager, the magic wand and a way they went and we expected them to run service as a business.

So we looked at this from a 2-dimensional scale, business skills and sort of their impact and the service skills that they needed. While technicians sort of down in this and here, they don't need a whole lot of business skills but they do need to have some skills because they do have an impact on the business. They are the ones that can make or break a sale. They can help, sell or they can un-sell a product. The service team leaders then have to have much more of an impact, they have much more of an impact but they also need many more business skills because they're not only managing these technicians below but they're responsible for what happens within that business. They're responsible for the technician’s activities.

And then our service managers, again they need the most business skills and all this, they have a huge impact on that business. So how are we going to fit all this in and develop training programs to accomplish all this? So we looked at technician development program, we looked at a service leader development program and then a program for our service manager. So three distinct programs that we had put in place. I don’t know if I am getting anyway there.

Okay, and so we developed programs to address each one of those. So as we went from a field technician to a service team leader, we wanted something to help them grow that strategy a bit. So we developed what we call our trusted advisor training which works very nicely into what Jimmy has just presented and that's the theme of what we call our technician training. We see them as trusted advisors and the whole theme that we used for the type of training they get is around this trusted advisor.

The service team leader training program to address them, these team leaders and then a service manager program for the service managers and I'll get into each one of these in a little bit of detail then.

So our service manager program, the first thing we did, we had to create this what we call the position profile and we came up with this around leadership skills, service excellent and growth. Those were the 3 key areas that we felt that they needed to improve upon. We did a complete assessment of all our service managers across the organization; this was done several years back. And then we created this gap analysis and created a base line and analyzed each one of our service managers to see how they performed against this baseline. And we also looked in at where those big gaps were in at and those gaps then became the program curriculum and what skills we were then trying to fill by those gaps in there.

And then prior to the program, we'll talk about this in little more slides so it's a larger in here is everyone that goes through then, we have the individual evaluate their skills against the program. So defining where they are and then have their manager define where perceive their service manager, so the general manager of a country would analyze their service manager skills and we would compare them. And then they would define an action plan on how they would address those skills gaps.

We also had to go through this assessment process in the side, is this somebody that really isn't going to cut it and there then would need to be a replacement strategy for them? When we recruited to refill those replacements or new positions as we expanded, we made sure that we recruited against that profile and look for people that met those skills in the profile. So obviously the gaps were a little bit smaller and then the rest fell into this development and enhancement step and that's really where the SMS program came to be about was, how do we get these people through that are you know potential performers as they were service leaders and how do they get to the next step and then how do we enhance the skills of those that are currently in that job but do have gaps to fulfill.

So those 3 key themes were all around in leadership, so it's the roles that they have, developing those roles, change management, we are going through a companywide SAP implementation, every single module, every single country and that requires a lot of change management. So it's a big piece of what we had seen that they need to do in order to move forward and of course the service excellence, that's just sort of the day to day things. What do you need to plan, execute, measure, and control your business, the sort of the fundamentals and make sure everyone are doing those fundamentals correctly and then growth. I forget which topic was we were talking about you know if you have a contract renewal rate of 90%, you still have 10% now that you got to gain in the next year but the 10% isn't really good enough because now we have to grow 10% again on top of what we had the prior year. So now we have to fill 20% in that new business. Well that new business isn't going to just come knocking at our door. We need to go find it and how are we going to find that, through marketing strategies, campaigns, looking for the opportunities.

So this is the position profile. So leadership has really broken down into these 5 major components and I won’t go through and read each one of the details. The slides will be available so you can see those afterwards. But it's really on performance management, making sure that they know how to do a performance management appraisal that they are looking at these things, providing coaching and feedback to the people that report to them. But they also develop their own personal leadership, how the team reacts and how the team behaves is really a reflection on the leader of that team if they're not you know having their own personal leadership, they're going to have a group of people that sort of mimic their behavior. If the behavior is bad, we're not going to get a good team performance in there as well.

The team leadership of course just spoke about peer collaboration was another important step. We don't expect these guys to be financial wizards, marketing geniuses, operational superstars. So they need to know how and where and who to collaborate with. So understanding what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are and working with counterparts in marketing or finance to understand those other pieces that they might need, and then how to develop not only themselves but their teams.

In service excellence, focusing around customer satisfaction, qualities, so delivering of the service quality, delivery performance that we’re doing things through consistency, we’re capturing revenue opportunity and productivity and of course, like any company we needed to make sure that we control our cost and that we're doing things in the most efficient manner.

And then in the growth segment, really account management, understanding what our accounts have in place, working with sales to define strategies and whether it'd be replacement or addition of new products, penetration and offering management. So what are we going to offer to what customers? You have seen the breadth of products that we have, it's not certainly five different products, we have 20,000 different active products plus a lot of stuff that's still in existence from the last 15 to 25, 30 years. How to promote service and the service offerings that we have and then how to manage campaigns. We're very much a market focused company as well. We create some campaigns centrally and push them down, but we also expect them to create some campaigns that drive some service business in their areas.

So it's a combination of things. It's not just the SMS programs that drive our success. There is a lot of training that is what I would call much more generic, it's not specific to Mettler-Toledo, it's maybe not even specific to service. So things like negotiation skills or time management or anything that you could probably find through local training, we said there are probably those things you're going to need to be identified. But they won't be part of this SMS program but they are needed to help build the successful service manager. They have to have the right attitude. If they go into this training program and think, I know this, I've been a service manager for 25 years, you're not going to teach me anything, they are probably not the person that's going to be the most successful coming out of it.

And really important too is that their direct manager is involved with this. Not only that they have to do evaluation of the participant that's coming to the program but there's follow up they have to do. They have to make service a key part of their entire organization as well. And through that we get successful service leaders.

I won't go through all the objectives of this so talk a little bit about the program more in detail. So we started this in 2011 that was our pilot program. We had 22 participants go through it that time. We've since done it last year. In 2 weeks’ time I will be in Germany starting the 2013 program and we already have plans for 14 and 15 and we'll probably do about 20 to 25 in each one of those categories as well or those years I should say.

We take a mix of participants from all over the globe so it's not just do Asia at one time, Europe at another time, we mix them all together, so we large organizations, small organizations. We try to bring a very diverse group into the mix because everybody learns from somebody else as well. Its country managers or in our larger organizations, they could be called regional service leaders. They get nominated by the management team of the global service team as ourselves. And we do two sessions. There is a 3-1/2 day session that we do in Europe in the May timeframe that took place in Southern Germany because Switzerland is way too expensive to have people go to. And then in the US, we do it as well. It is 3-1/2 days in the August timeframe. In the last couple of years, we've done it in Chicago, because again, all these people are flying international. Chicago is a great place to come in. They don't have to try to wait for another flight and go to Columbus, Ohio which is not the easiest place in the world to get to. Its leaders, teaching leaders approach so we have members from our global service team; we have people that are from our service organizations around the globe come in help train them. We make a combination of workshops and break all groups so it’s—you can imagine 3-1/2 days of death by PowerPoint, it’s just was glassing over at that point. So we break this down into modules. Every module has a topic and then there’s generally a workshop that goes around with that module as well. So it’s learning part of what we do in that module and then immediately applying that in a workshop environment.

In between, they have a comprehensive business plan that they need to create. The timing of this is not accidental as well. They also have to do this in the early September timeframe for the budgeting process. So this again is something that is work that they should do and it’s not anything extra or different that they should be doing. It’s just much more comprehensive than they probably have done it in the past.

We also have a lot of pre-work assignments so I’m busy collecting e-mails from people this week and following up with them to make sure that they turn in their list of assignments they have to do so that some of them are the… they have a questionnaire on their KPIs, we have them collect some of their marketing material, we have collect some of their customer satisfaction surveys that they currently use and we use those in the workshops in the programs as we go through those. We have some team building activities that go along with this that are quite interesting as well and it’s interesting I put on here; the program language is done in English. We of course have managers from all over the world and they actually rarely get a chance to practice English. I remember talking to the one guy and he said by the 3rd or 4th day during the first session, he said his head actually hurt because everything was being converted from natural language through his filter and then in English and vice versa. So his attention to what he had to pay attention to was even greater than the native speakers that just hear it naturally, process it naturally.

So this is basically in the timeline. We have a kickoff, WebEx that we do in February timeframe. So actually, there’s probably one that even happens way before this. We tell them probably around, between Thanksgiving and Christmas timeframe that oh by the way you’re going to be in this program next year and these are the dates. Don’t book holidays, don’t book vacation because we don’t take excuses other than you know, your parents have died or you’ve taken seriously ill or you’ve left the company. But we want to make sure that they are available so we tell them these dates you know virtually 6 to 8 months ahead of time. So then, during this kickoff WebEx, we go through the entire program, what they have to do. They have some time in there to collect and do all those pre-work assignments. So it’s not given to them at the last minute but of course we still have to come in at the last minute. We have this block then for Europe, the in between session again last about 3 months so we give them some opportunity in between there and then our US session that we focus then on processes and tools and implementations of programs. And then we do a 30- and 60-, 90-day follow up at the end. So each one of us calls the service managers that go through and I’ll show you a little bit of detail about what we ask for in there.

So this is the assessment that we do, so we have them rank. This is was the growth characteristics that we’re all listed down here. We ask them to rank their skill against that and then the importance of that, how they feel the importance as of that skill. So the participant does that and the manager does that and then we plot this out on this radar graph and they use that as sort of the talking point before they come to the program. So they understand where are their strengths, what are their gaps, what things do they need to focus on in the program in order to be successful then. Because of course, not everyone has the same need within those.

And then like I said at the end, they… what things they’re going to do, they fill this out as one of the last sessions in the August section is what are they going to do in their first 90 days. So we have them list that out. What resources do they need to do that in order to make sure that they can meet these goals or objectives and what is the outcome that they expect to get from that? And then 30, 60 and 90-days, the team that I work with follows up with each and every one to find out what they’ve done in the last 30 days, how they’re making progress on these and what they’re going to do then for the next 60 days.

So the next program was the service team leader training. Similarly, we had started this actually in 2010 with some, with 3 country or sorry… I messed that out, it was 3 programs in 6 countries. In 2011, we went out to 13 and 2012, we actually cut back because we revamp the program a bit, made a little bit more modular and rolled it out again and we expect that we will be continuing to roll this out into more and more countries. Again this is for the, the service team leaders, service supervisor levels. It’s a 2-day session. We require that we do this in an offsite location so that we take them out of their office environment, out of the branch environment, wherever they are. So they’re not getting interrupted by phone calls, somebody coming up knocking on the door and hey, I got to go look after this problem now. We’re getting them completely out of that environment.

There is a pre-work questionnaire which I’ll show you in a second and similarly they have an action plan to follow up with that. It’s delivered by someone from the global service leadership team, together with the local service manager and sometimes even the local HR person helps us with that. Again, it’s a combination then of workshops, PowerPoints, and some breakup groups to apply those things too.

Primarily it’s done in local language. Our language skill levels, once we get pass sort of the country service manager down to the next level within Europe and even within Asia particularly, English starts to drop off considerably. So we do have some German speakers on our team, of course English speakers on our team so those primarily we did in native language. But I also did two, one in Russia and one in Spanish. I speak neither of the two languages. Well we did it through interpreters. So one, it was the local HR person in Russia. I’d speak, she’d interpret. They’d ask questions, she’d interpret and so it didn’t take two days. It took like about 3-1/2 half days to get through that. And the Spanish one, we actually had some simultaneous translators which was kind of like the UN, you hear the person you know speaking to you in Spanish but in your ear you hear the English version of that and it was kind of interesting. It was the first time I had done it and it was quite effective actually.

So again, the position profile again was based on leadership, service excellence, and growth. The assessment that was done prior to is really a questionnaire and without actually breaking each one of these questions and each one of these topics like we did on the service manager’s profile, we just had random questions that we ask. Where do you spend your time doing this? What do you do in this situation? And then we’d quantify these things at the end and put them into categories of, that was process oriented, customer oriented employee or financial, and we broke this into these quadrants. And then we fed back this information during the session of you know ideally where you should spend your time and then where they actually are spending their time.

You know, I’ll skip the objectives because it was really around these internally focused and externally focused activities. So internally, it’s looking around processes and people and customer and sort of these financial tasks which is part of their job is actually you know helping drive that service business externally. So it’s how they do and what they do to spend their time in and around these areas.

So the financial task could be things like budget or cost management, process oriented task or KPIs and how do they improve their process there, employee task or engagement and employee development. And customer oriented task like how much time do they spend with the customer, dealing customer dialogue or service marketing or escalation issues, so trying to gauge where their time is spent in those areas.

And then our third program for the technicians is really work well into what Jim had talked about in his, we actually call our program the trusted advisor training. So our technicians, we refer to them as trusted advisors. It shows up in various things internally and both externally and how we see the technician and the technician’s role to the customer, so really wanted to enhance that role. We want them to understand what is their relationship and how that—how they fit into that relationship with the customer. They want to…we want to make sure that we turn every customer contact into a loyal relationship. I think somebody mentioned that in one of the earlier ones. The relationship that a technician has with a customer is extremely invaluable. So much so I guess when like Jim mentioned, when it gets to how they demand a specific technician for their problem, that can also be an issue, but we really want to have that strong bond between customer and technician.

I want to make sure that we can improve their skills in communication. You know using the diverse product portfolio that we have, so we have technicians that are anywhere from you know EE’s to guys that lift you know 50-pound weights all day long. Strong backs weak minds sometimes. But you know they still need to have good communication skills. They still have to talk to customers; they still have to understand what the business that they provide, and making sure that they have the mindset to help customers with their needs. Again, going back to the gym, for example the gym had with the hospital bed. That’s the sort of thing we want to do. You know, look around, talk to the customer and find out what their needs are. And then, being able to be proactive, serve the customer and especially with dealing with difficult situations. You know prior to this soft skill training was really done more or less up to the individual country when they needed it. I had sat through some in the U.K., and they said that one guy said with the company about 35 years and they could remember it happening once way back in like the early 80s or something. So again it’s something that’s visible. We track it, we measure it and we record upon it on what they’ve been doing.

So there, the trust advisor training is really broken down into four modules over 2 days. We look at customer orientation and skills; it’s called really, would you do business with you. So if you were the customer, would you want to do business with yourself and working around things like that. The second module is around their communication skills. So active listening, probing questions that sort of thing, analyzing the customer needs, this has really come down again to that trusted advisor training. And in fact, I don’t know if anyone noticed when Jim asked if we encourage selling by technicians, I didn’t put my hand up because we don’t encourage them to sell, we encourage them to find leads. We don’t want them to sell in fact. So we actually are quite clear that we say, our trusted advisors are not sales people. We don’t incentivize them that way but they are the best source of leads that we have in the company. In fact, leads that come from technicians are usually the highest quality, the highest converted and it’s where we get the most number from.

And then the last thing is really then how do they deal with delicate situations. We have some role playing there and some other things of different methods on how to change behavior and working with a delicate situation like that. So we have the interactive exercises. That’s also unique because these guys are upwards in age usually, the role playing, the customer—role playing anything other than themselves is really, really difficult for them to do. But they go through it and actually, a lot of them say, hey that was kind of good to go through that because I now see what it’s like to be on the other side of that. We make very specific role plays. We have very different businesses. We try to—as we put technicians through this, we try to create a scenario for a retail technician as they would find it for them because that didn’t translate very easily if we said, well you know here’s the situation in a cement plant. Well lab technician has never set foot in a cement plan, he has no idea of the surroundings of what things that they might have in that situation, so we made these role plays very specific to the type of customer or the type of business that they may work in. And having the manager there is really important. Not only just from an observer standpoint, just to see how his employees are reacting and answering in these situations. So how we’re doing for time there?

So key takeaways with this is really defining the right skills for success and then go through and define what is right for you. Obviously this is what we’ve done but it’s not necessarily right for everyone, but you got to define what is right for yourselves. You prepare to make those tough decisions when it comes to replacement. It’s never easy but sometimes it needs to be done and certainly don’t compromise on recruitment because if you make the wrong decision, you’re stuck with that wrong decision for quite some time before you can actually get out of that situation a lot of times.

Develop the program based on your unique requirements and outsource what’s generic. So you’ll find you know generic programs for like I said, negotiation skills or coaching and feedback, some of those things you just find anywhere, the catalogs from AMA and other places. So really concentrate on what is unique for your business. Require your involvement from the participants, direct managers, have that right balance between theory and practice so you’re not putting people into a coma for 3 days, watching PowerPoints. Make the assignments meaningful for their job. If somebody says, one more task to do that I have no idea why I need to do this. And have multiple experts there. Draw in the expertise that you have within your company to do that. Get away from the office as I mentioned and offsite location is the greatest place to be for this. For our SMS program, for the German location we’re in the Black Forest in Germany, it’s away from everything, so it’s really hard to get to but it’s really close to Switzerland so they’re flying to Switzerland and drive up there. And then in Chicago we don’t have an office in Chicago but we go right downtown in Chicago. So it’s near everything but it’s away from everyone’s office there. Use the survey program so we survey like everybody else does at the end of the program and we take those surveys and we incorporate the feedback from the participants into the next year’s survey, and we tell them hey, this is what changed last year from this year because that was the feedback from your peers a year before. So we want to continue to make it better. And it’s about having some fun with this too and we have some fun. Those… that we take them zip lining and do some other things and you know even in the trust advisor training, getting these technicians out of their comfort zone, doing some of these exercises turns into be in a lot of fun so…

Field Force Optimization

Len Vanderhulst, Mettler-Toledo: Generating ROI on Human Capital, from Field Service East 2013

Video transcript:

Investing in the human capital is the topic I have today and this actually just came out in our company newsletter just before coming out here which I thought was pretty appropriate. As a company, we had invested in 14,000 trainings globally across our company and that include classroom, e-learning. 3300 of those were service training, 5600 of those trainings were sales training and 42 were professional training. So it was kind of nice to see that we are investing in it. Quite heavily it looks like.

So to give you a little bit of background about Mettler-Toledo, I'm not sure how many of you heard of Mettler-Toledo most of it. Everyone knows of Toledo Scales or seen Toledo Scales in grocery stores or at the fair when I guess you weight, that big dial scale that still works that's 50 some odd years old is one of our products. I forgot who it was that said you only got 30-year-old product that still run; we still have some of those as well.

We are the largest provider of weighing instrumentation for laboratories, manufacturing, and food retailing. You won't find us in bathroom scales or doctor's offices that they don't really want to pay a lot of money for a scale like that. We have a worldwide presence, a little over 12,000 employees and just under 2.4 billion US dollars in sales.

We're a global manufacturing and sales organization. We service and sell in 38 countries, of the 55 employees that are involved in sales, marketing, and service and support about 2500 of those are technicians. We have R&D sites across the US, Europe and in Japan and in Asia. And we do direct service in selling in all the countries that are in blue on the map there. So it's quite a large globally spread service organization.

We provide solutions across the customer value chain and so this is sort of depicting a customer that we would typically see that has R&D facilities, quality control, for scale up and production, for pharmaceuticals and so on, we're in that space as well. Production solutions such as bench scales, counting scales, packaging solutions, so check weighing, measuring boxes that are going down filling line, packet transportation, logistics solutions. So we sell to UPS, FedEx, DHL, all the major companies that way and we weigh boxes, dimension the boxes that go through those systems and pallets that go on the trucks. And some of those trucks end up in grocery stores where we also have solutions in our food retailing. It's the other place, a lot of people see us the deli counter scales; check out scales and so on.

So I will skip through this a lot of this product stuffs. What we have things for weighing down to micrograms and on our transportation end; we have things that go up to weigh trucks and trains up to kilotons, so pretty much everything in between. And then in our fresh food management it's the—like I said there are counter scales, and deli scales and so on.

So what brought us to this point, I think it was Jennifer that mentioned earlier today in her talk, the 2009 crisis came along and we started to look at, how do we grow our service business despite of what's going on. We really start to look internally what can we change, what can we do differently and so we came up with this mandate that we needed to have better service technicians, better service team leaders and better service managers to help get us through that to drive the service business. And we had to weave these things together so that it also gave us a career path for people to move through the organization. As we have before, we just took technicians, we made them a service team leader, we made service team leader into service manager, the magic wand and a way they went and we expected them to run service as a business.

So we looked at this from a 2-dimensional scale, business skills and sort of their impact and the service skills that they needed. While technicians sort of down in this and here, they don't need a whole lot of business skills but they do need to have some skills because they do have an impact on the business. They are the ones that can make or break a sale. They can help, sell or they can un-sell a product. The service team leaders then have to have much more of an impact, they have much more of an impact but they also need many more business skills because they're not only managing these technicians below but they're responsible for what happens within that business. They're responsible for the technician’s activities.

And then our service managers, again they need the most business skills and all this, they have a huge impact on that business. So how are we going to fit all this in and develop training programs to accomplish all this? So we looked at technician development program, we looked at a service leader development program and then a program for our service manager. So three distinct programs that we had put in place. I don’t know if I am getting anyway there.

Okay, and so we developed programs to address each one of those. So as we went from a field technician to a service team leader, we wanted something to help them grow that strategy a bit. So we developed what we call our trusted advisor training which works very nicely into what Jimmy has just presented and that's the theme of what we call our technician training. We see them as trusted advisors and the whole theme that we used for the type of training they get is around this trusted advisor.

The service team leader training program to address them, these team leaders and then a service manager program for the service managers and I'll get into each one of these in a little bit of detail then.

So our service manager program, the first thing we did, we had to create this what we call the position profile and we came up with this around leadership skills, service excellent and growth. Those were the 3 key areas that we felt that they needed to improve upon. We did a complete assessment of all our service managers across the organization; this was done several years back. And then we created this gap analysis and created a base line and analyzed each one of our service managers to see how they performed against this baseline. And we also looked in at where those big gaps were in at and those gaps then became the program curriculum and what skills we were then trying to fill by those gaps in there.

And then prior to the program, we'll talk about this in little more slides so it's a larger in here is everyone that goes through then, we have the individual evaluate their skills against the program. So defining where they are and then have their manager define where perceive their service manager, so the general manager of a country would analyze their service manager skills and we would compare them. And then they would define an action plan on how they would address those skills gaps.

We also had to go through this assessment process in the side, is this somebody that really isn't going to cut it and there then would need to be a replacement strategy for them? When we recruited to refill those replacements or new positions as we expanded, we made sure that we recruited against that profile and look for people that met those skills in the profile. So obviously the gaps were a little bit smaller and then the rest fell into this development and enhancement step and that's really where the SMS program came to be about was, how do we get these people through that are you know potential performers as they were service leaders and how do they get to the next step and then how do we enhance the skills of those that are currently in that job but do have gaps to fulfill.

So those 3 key themes were all around in leadership, so it's the roles that they have, developing those roles, change management, we are going through a companywide SAP implementation, every single module, every single country and that requires a lot of change management. So it's a big piece of what we had seen that they need to do in order to move forward and of course the service excellence, that's just sort of the day to day things. What do you need to plan, execute, measure, and control your business, the sort of the fundamentals and make sure everyone are doing those fundamentals correctly and then growth. I forget which topic was we were talking about you know if you have a contract renewal rate of 90%, you still have 10% now that you got to gain in the next year but the 10% isn't really good enough because now we have to grow 10% again on top of what we had the prior year. So now we have to fill 20% in that new business. Well that new business isn't going to just come knocking at our door. We need to go find it and how are we going to find that, through marketing strategies, campaigns, looking for the opportunities.

So this is the position profile. So leadership has really broken down into these 5 major components and I won’t go through and read each one of the details. The slides will be available so you can see those afterwards. But it's really on performance management, making sure that they know how to do a performance management appraisal that they are looking at these things, providing coaching and feedback to the people that report to them. But they also develop their own personal leadership, how the team reacts and how the team behaves is really a reflection on the leader of that team if they're not you know having their own personal leadership, they're going to have a group of people that sort of mimic their behavior. If the behavior is bad, we're not going to get a good team performance in there as well.

The team leadership of course just spoke about peer collaboration was another important step. We don't expect these guys to be financial wizards, marketing geniuses, operational superstars. So they need to know how and where and who to collaborate with. So understanding what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are and working with counterparts in marketing or finance to understand those other pieces that they might need, and then how to develop not only themselves but their teams.

In service excellence, focusing around customer satisfaction, qualities, so delivering of the service quality, delivery performance that we’re doing things through consistency, we’re capturing revenue opportunity and productivity and of course, like any company we needed to make sure that we control our cost and that we're doing things in the most efficient manner.

And then in the growth segment, really account management, understanding what our accounts have in place, working with sales to define strategies and whether it'd be replacement or addition of new products, penetration and offering management. So what are we going to offer to what customers? You have seen the breadth of products that we have, it's not certainly five different products, we have 20,000 different active products plus a lot of stuff that's still in existence from the last 15 to 25, 30 years. How to promote service and the service offerings that we have and then how to manage campaigns. We're very much a market focused company as well. We create some campaigns centrally and push them down, but we also expect them to create some campaigns that drive some service business in their areas.

So it's a combination of things. It's not just the SMS programs that drive our success. There is a lot of training that is what I would call much more generic, it's not specific to Mettler-Toledo, it's maybe not even specific to service. So things like negotiation skills or time management or anything that you could probably find through local training, we said there are probably those things you're going to need to be identified. But they won't be part of this SMS program but they are needed to help build the successful service manager. They have to have the right attitude. If they go into this training program and think, I know this, I've been a service manager for 25 years, you're not going to teach me anything, they are probably not the person that's going to be the most successful coming out of it.

And really important too is that their direct manager is involved with this. Not only that they have to do evaluation of the participant that's coming to the program but there's follow up they have to do. They have to make service a key part of their entire organization as well. And through that we get successful service leaders.

I won't go through all the objectives of this so talk a little bit about the program more in detail. So we started this in 2011 that was our pilot program. We had 22 participants go through it that time. We've since done it last year. In 2 weeks’ time I will be in Germany starting the 2013 program and we already have plans for 14 and 15 and we'll probably do about 20 to 25 in each one of those categories as well or those years I should say.

We take a mix of participants from all over the globe so it's not just do Asia at one time, Europe at another time, we mix them all together, so we large organizations, small organizations. We try to bring a very diverse group into the mix because everybody learns from somebody else as well. Its country managers or in our larger organizations, they could be called regional service leaders. They get nominated by the management team of the global service team as ourselves. And we do two sessions. There is a 3-1/2 day session that we do in Europe in the May timeframe that took place in Southern Germany because Switzerland is way too expensive to have people go to. And then in the US, we do it as well. It is 3-1/2 days in the August timeframe. In the last couple of years, we've done it in Chicago, because again, all these people are flying international. Chicago is a great place to come in. They don't have to try to wait for another flight and go to Columbus, Ohio which is not the easiest place in the world to get to. Its leaders, teaching leaders approach so we have members from our global service team; we have people that are from our service organizations around the globe come in help train them. We make a combination of workshops and break all groups so it’s—you can imagine 3-1/2 days of death by PowerPoint, it’s just was glassing over at that point. So we break this down into modules. Every module has a topic and then there’s generally a workshop that goes around with that module as well. So it’s learning part of what we do in that module and then immediately applying that in a workshop environment.

In between, they have a comprehensive business plan that they need to create. The timing of this is not accidental as well. They also have to do this in the early September timeframe for the budgeting process. So this again is something that is work that they should do and it’s not anything extra or different that they should be doing. It’s just much more comprehensive than they probably have done it in the past.

We also have a lot of pre-work assignments so I’m busy collecting e-mails from people this week and following up with them to make sure that they turn in their list of assignments they have to do so that some of them are the… they have a questionnaire on their KPIs, we have them collect some of their marketing material, we have collect some of their customer satisfaction surveys that they currently use and we use those in the workshops in the programs as we go through those. We have some team building activities that go along with this that are quite interesting as well and it’s interesting I put on here; the program language is done in English. We of course have managers from all over the world and they actually rarely get a chance to practice English. I remember talking to the one guy and he said by the 3rd or 4th day during the first session, he said his head actually hurt because everything was being converted from natural language through his filter and then in English and vice versa. So his attention to what he had to pay attention to was even greater than the native speakers that just hear it naturally, process it naturally.

So this is basically in the timeline. We have a kickoff, WebEx that we do in February timeframe. So actually, there’s probably one that even happens way before this. We tell them probably around, between Thanksgiving and Christmas timeframe that oh by the way you’re going to be in this program next year and these are the dates. Don’t book holidays, don’t book vacation because we don’t take excuses other than you know, your parents have died or you’ve taken seriously ill or you’ve left the company. But we want to make sure that they are available so we tell them these dates you know virtually 6 to 8 months ahead of time. So then, during this kickoff WebEx, we go through the entire program, what they have to do. They have some time in there to collect and do all those pre-work assignments. So it’s not given to them at the last minute but of course we still have to come in at the last minute. We have this block then for Europe, the in between session again last about 3 months so we give them some opportunity in between there and then our US session that we focus then on processes and tools and implementations of programs. And then we do a 30- and 60-, 90-day follow up at the end. So each one of us calls the service managers that go through and I’ll show you a little bit of detail about what we ask for in there.

So this is the assessment that we do, so we have them rank. This is was the growth characteristics that we’re all listed down here. We ask them to rank their skill against that and then the importance of that, how they feel the importance as of that skill. So the participant does that and the manager does that and then we plot this out on this radar graph and they use that as sort of the talking point before they come to the program. So they understand where are their strengths, what are their gaps, what things do they need to focus on in the program in order to be successful then. Because of course, not everyone has the same need within those.

And then like I said at the end, they… what things they’re going to do, they fill this out as one of the last sessions in the August section is what are they going to do in their first 90 days. So we have them list that out. What resources do they need to do that in order to make sure that they can meet these goals or objectives and what is the outcome that they expect to get from that? And then 30, 60 and 90-days, the team that I work with follows up with each and every one to find out what they’ve done in the last 30 days, how they’re making progress on these and what they’re going to do then for the next 60 days.

So the next program was the service team leader training. Similarly, we had started this actually in 2010 with some, with 3 country or sorry… I messed that out, it was 3 programs in 6 countries. In 2011, we went out to 13 and 2012, we actually cut back because we revamp the program a bit, made a little bit more modular and rolled it out again and we expect that we will be continuing to roll this out into more and more countries. Again this is for the, the service team leaders, service supervisor levels. It’s a 2-day session. We require that we do this in an offsite location so that we take them out of their office environment, out of the branch environment, wherever they are. So they’re not getting interrupted by phone calls, somebody coming up knocking on the door and hey, I got to go look after this problem now. We’re getting them completely out of that environment.

There is a pre-work questionnaire which I’ll show you in a second and similarly they have an action plan to follow up with that. It’s delivered by someone from the global service leadership team, together with the local service manager and sometimes even the local HR person helps us with that. Again, it’s a combination then of workshops, PowerPoints, and some breakup groups to apply those things too.

Primarily it’s done in local language. Our language skill levels, once we get pass sort of the country service manager down to the next level within Europe and even within Asia particularly, English starts to drop off considerably. So we do have some German speakers on our team, of course English speakers on our team so those primarily we did in native language. But I also did two, one in Russia and one in Spanish. I speak neither of the two languages. Well we did it through interpreters. So one, it was the local HR person in Russia. I’d speak, she’d interpret. They’d ask questions, she’d interpret and so it didn’t take two days. It took like about 3-1/2 half days to get through that. And the Spanish one, we actually had some simultaneous translators which was kind of like the UN, you hear the person you know speaking to you in Spanish but in your ear you hear the English version of that and it was kind of interesting. It was the first time I had done it and it was quite effective actually.

So again, the position profile again was based on leadership, service excellence, and growth. The assessment that was done prior to is really a questionnaire and without actually breaking each one of these questions and each one of these topics like we did on the service manager’s profile, we just had random questions that we ask. Where do you spend your time doing this? What do you do in this situation? And then we’d quantify these things at the end and put them into categories of, that was process oriented, customer oriented employee or financial, and we broke this into these quadrants. And then we fed back this information during the session of you know ideally where you should spend your time and then where they actually are spending their time.

You know, I’ll skip the objectives because it was really around these internally focused and externally focused activities. So internally, it’s looking around processes and people and customer and sort of these financial tasks which is part of their job is actually you know helping drive that service business externally. So it’s how they do and what they do to spend their time in and around these areas.

So the financial task could be things like budget or cost management, process oriented task or KPIs and how do they improve their process there, employee task or engagement and employee development. And customer oriented task like how much time do they spend with the customer, dealing customer dialogue or service marketing or escalation issues, so trying to gauge where their time is spent in those areas.

And then our third program for the technicians is really work well into what Jim had talked about in his, we actually call our program the trusted advisor training. So our technicians, we refer to them as trusted advisors. It shows up in various things internally and both externally and how we see the technician and the technician’s role to the customer, so really wanted to enhance that role. We want them to understand what is their relationship and how that—how they fit into that relationship with the customer. They want to…we want to make sure that we turn every customer contact into a loyal relationship. I think somebody mentioned that in one of the earlier ones. The relationship that a technician has with a customer is extremely invaluable. So much so I guess when like Jim mentioned, when it gets to how they demand a specific technician for their problem, that can also be an issue, but we really want to have that strong bond between customer and technician.

I want to make sure that we can improve their skills in communication. You know using the diverse product portfolio that we have, so we have technicians that are anywhere from you know EE’s to guys that lift you know 50-pound weights all day long. Strong backs weak minds sometimes. But you know they still need to have good communication skills. They still have to talk to customers; they still have to understand what the business that they provide, and making sure that they have the mindset to help customers with their needs. Again, going back to the gym, for example the gym had with the hospital bed. That’s the sort of thing we want to do. You know, look around, talk to the customer and find out what their needs are. And then, being able to be proactive, serve the customer and especially with dealing with difficult situations. You know prior to this soft skill training was really done more or less up to the individual country when they needed it. I had sat through some in the U.K., and they said that one guy said with the company about 35 years and they could remember it happening once way back in like the early 80s or something. So again it’s something that’s visible. We track it, we measure it and we record upon it on what they’ve been doing.

So there, the trust advisor training is really broken down into four modules over 2 days. We look at customer orientation and skills; it’s called really, would you do business with you. So if you were the customer, would you want to do business with yourself and working around things like that. The second module is around their communication skills. So active listening, probing questions that sort of thing, analyzing the customer needs, this has really come down again to that trusted advisor training. And in fact, I don’t know if anyone noticed when Jim asked if we encourage selling by technicians, I didn’t put my hand up because we don’t encourage them to sell, we encourage them to find leads. We don’t want them to sell in fact. So we actually are quite clear that we say, our trusted advisors are not sales people. We don’t incentivize them that way but they are the best source of leads that we have in the company. In fact, leads that come from technicians are usually the highest quality, the highest converted and it’s where we get the most number from.

And then the last thing is really then how do they deal with delicate situations. We have some role playing there and some other things of different methods on how to change behavior and working with a delicate situation like that. So we have the interactive exercises. That’s also unique because these guys are upwards in age usually, the role playing, the customer—role playing anything other than themselves is really, really difficult for them to do. But they go through it and actually, a lot of them say, hey that was kind of good to go through that because I now see what it’s like to be on the other side of that. We make very specific role plays. We have very different businesses. We try to—as we put technicians through this, we try to create a scenario for a retail technician as they would find it for them because that didn’t translate very easily if we said, well you know here’s the situation in a cement plant. Well lab technician has never set foot in a cement plan, he has no idea of the surroundings of what things that they might have in that situation, so we made these role plays very specific to the type of customer or the type of business that they may work in. And having the manager there is really important. Not only just from an observer standpoint, just to see how his employees are reacting and answering in these situations. So how we’re doing for time there?

So key takeaways with this is really defining the right skills for success and then go through and define what is right for you. Obviously this is what we’ve done but it’s not necessarily right for everyone, but you got to define what is right for yourselves. You prepare to make those tough decisions when it comes to replacement. It’s never easy but sometimes it needs to be done and certainly don’t compromise on recruitment because if you make the wrong decision, you’re stuck with that wrong decision for quite some time before you can actually get out of that situation a lot of times.

Develop the program based on your unique requirements and outsource what’s generic. So you’ll find you know generic programs for like I said, negotiation skills or coaching and feedback, some of those things you just find anywhere, the catalogs from AMA and other places. So really concentrate on what is unique for your business. Require your involvement from the participants, direct managers, have that right balance between theory and practice so you’re not putting people into a coma for 3 days, watching PowerPoints. Make the assignments meaningful for their job. If somebody says, one more task to do that I have no idea why I need to do this. And have multiple experts there. Draw in the expertise that you have within your company to do that. Get away from the office as I mentioned and offsite location is the greatest place to be for this. For our SMS program, for the German location we’re in the Black Forest in Germany, it’s away from everything, so it’s really hard to get to but it’s really close to Switzerland so they’re flying to Switzerland and drive up there. And then in Chicago we don’t have an office in Chicago but we go right downtown in Chicago. So it’s near everything but it’s away from everyone’s office there. Use the survey program so we survey like everybody else does at the end of the program and we take those surveys and we incorporate the feedback from the participants into the next year’s survey, and we tell them hey, this is what changed last year from this year because that was the feedback from your peers a year before. So we want to continue to make it better. And it’s about having some fun with this too and we have some fun. Those… that we take them zip lining and do some other things and you know even in the trust advisor training, getting these technicians out of their comfort zone, doing some of these exercises turns into be in a lot of fun so…