Financial Training for Sales Managers

A major consumer products company used Enspire’s Business Challenge to provide its sales managers with financial skills to ensure profitability for the company.

Challenge

Sales managers at this leading global consumer products company are dedicated, experienced, and possess a great deal of knowledge about their products, their clients’ needs, and the needs of the consumer. But success as a company depends on more than just its ability to sell its goods. The company needs to make a profit—and without proper financial training, it can be challenging for volume-focused sales managers to understand how they can help make that happen in their day-to-day work.

Approach

Enspire delivered Business Challenge, a blended solution featuring a multi-turn immersive game in which players must guide a virtual company through a simulated marketplace. During the game, each team chooses from a set of fictional consumer-packaged product lines to develop and manage. Teams then analyze income statements and other financial reports to help them make manufacturing decisions, decide when to take out loans, set prices, allocate marketing and R&D spending, and enact production efficiency improvements.

The products and companies in Business Challenge are fictional, but the experience closely resembles the financial challenges and competitive landscapes the company faces. As a result, sales managers can apply concepts from the game—such as financial forecasting, capacity versus customer satisfaction, and distribution, promotion, and advertising—to their daily activities.

Outcome

The company has gathered positive user feedback from participants. Participants were very competitive while playing the game. One user remarked, “I’m sweating!” because of the game’s intensity. Another participant commented, “This is so much fun, I could play it on the weekends.” By creating a competitive, immersive, and fun environment, the company ensured that their employees gained a detailed understanding of business finance principles and agility in crunching numbers, thus making them effective business partners to their retail customers.