My name is Chad Kasprzak, sales manager for GreenMark Equipment, John Deere dealership in Indiana and Michigan. We have 16 locations and somewhere around 60 sales people and with managers about 75. We just took that team this past week through Jim Pancero's training, 2-day training, with two phases of our team going through the 2-day training.
When looking for a trainer and partner to do this with we had not a whole lot of in-house training like this in the past. We hadn't really needed to in the last several years.
So Jim was on our list due to his past experience with John Deere dealers and John Deere. Also, his past experience, my interactions included sending some of our salespeople to one of his trainings and his ability to involve management to create some stickability with the training and the advanced part of his training, not all basic skills, more of an advanced training for our professionals, put him at the forefront of looking at a person to do this training.
However, the thing that really caught our eye, and working with Jim leading up to this, was his insistence on the sales managers being involved, and ownership being involved for the stickability of this training. A little bit different than others we had talked to and also the advanced nature of what he proposed to give us a competitive advantage.
In regards to the training Jim obviously took copious notes from our lead up type discussions about our unique situation, our unique sales team, the unique status of our market today, as well as the unique culture of our dealership. And translated those into what I would consider a more customized approach to this training versus a set rote type of training, including the things that we needed to fit the umbrella of what he's trying to propose with the competitive advantage that he's going to give us through his training, or gave us through his training.
During the training we had our challenge of our advanced sales pros going through their cycle of learning the material, buying into the material, and ultimately won them over by evidence by their taking notes and comments after the fact. So of course our next step is to keep this rolling with our management team and taking this into the future. I really feel that Jim Pancero's approach to this type of training is unique and that uniqueness with definitely give us an advantage as far as I can tell.