Avantor is a Fortune 500 Company and Leading Global Provider of Products and Services to the Biopharma, Healthcare, Education and Government, and Advanced Technologies Industries.
THE CHALLENGE
“Duncan was invited to deliver a keynote to Avantor’s Sales Leadership Team to bring them together to motivate and inspire them to work more collaboratively and increase sales as the world entered a global recession”
“Avantor sales team had a number of challenges including people leaving and low job dissatisfaction. Other members of the sales leadership team were not using the admin team to support them with paperwork processing. The UK was also on the brink of a recession so this keynote needed to be inspirational and motivational, focussing the Sales leaders to lead and not just manage and to drive their team to create better relationships with their clients to accelerate sales and increase market share.“
DUNCAN’S SOLUTION
“Duncan had the luxury of speaking with the VP of Global sales for Avantor so understanding the expectations and how he could help and add value was a lot easier.”
Often when clients approach Duncan, there is some mis-alignment as to the outcomes of the conferece and the focus of Duncan’s keynote. Duncan always encourages and alignment meeting between the event planners, as well as the other senior leadership team to understand their challenges and goals. This way he is able to curate and create a perfectly tailored keynote to their expectations. Here Duncan was given the luxury of speaking directly with the VP of global sales and the group that reprted to her were all present in the room. In this way it was easy to understand the challenges and goals of the keynote.
Duncan drew examples from both psychological experiments as well as other challenges that were being experienced in other organizations he has spoken at to make his keynote both contextually sound and backed up by evidence of strategies that actually work. This was a small group so was a great opportunity to explore challenges faced by the team at the end of the keynote with an impromptu Q an A. Duncan also included some demonstrations of influence, persuasion and collaboration in the form of his mentalism routines and included a short interactive experiment for everyone to focus their attention on the importance of influence and working together to achieve collective goals.
THE RESULT
“I received a lot of positive feedback and the same-day endorsement from the Head of Sales at the top of the page cemented the success of this.”
By the end of the session, the team were already beginning to think more collaboratively and the content shared was already beginning to change perspectives. This was a small group of only 20 sales leaders so was a great opportunity to keep the keynote as a hybrid between keynote and open forum where the team felt even more invited to interact and share their thoughts and insights. This gave us the opportunity to get really granular with the content to tailor even more to their challenges.
THOUGHTS FROM DUNCAN
“Whilst speaking to large groups of 200 or more is great fun, small groups like these is sometimes even more special as it’s even easier to connect with every single member of the group and address their challenges”
Avantor was a really fun client to work for as they presented some real challenges, making the brief and goal of the keynote easier. Not only that, the team was really engaging and ready to embrace the new perspectives that were shared. Their growth looks to continue and if they both apply and employ the strategies I shared then there should be no reason Avantor won’t be able to navigate the global economic crisis and grow their market share at the same time.
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