Givaudan Sales School

The Aim

With over 9,500 employees, Givaudan is the global leader in the creation of flavors and fragrances, supplying food, beverage, and consumer products from its 90 worldwide locations and 30 production sites. Givaudan’s goal is to remain and build on its current market-leading position. To differentiate themselves from their competition, Givaudan’s management team recognized that they needed to relate to their clients in a better and different way. They wanted to shift their sales conversations from being solely about flavors to talking about value for their client’s business, with the aim of becoming long-term trusted partners.

The Solution

Givaudan created the Flavours Sales School, a program designed to both build sales capabilities and the sales coaching capabilities that managers would need to make the program sustainable. The sales organization and L&D team selected Creating Client Value (CCV) as the consultative sales methodology to drive change and sales success.

Sales Managers are central to the program and attend a manager workshop to build their coaching skills. They also focus on the specific challenges of coaching salespeople on CCV. They then attend a CCV workshop with their sales teams, where CCV tools and concepts are applied to real-life client opportunities. The managers have an active role in the workshop as they coach their teams through the exercises and role-plays.

Following the workshop, managers get one-on-one coaching support from Imparta faculty members, either face-to-face or phone-based. This helps them to support their team members, who leave the workshop with specific assignments to complete. Salespeople must also pass a knowledge test to prove that they know the details of CCV.

A few months later, the team attends a refresher workshop, where stories and ideas are shared to identify and promulgate best practice application of CCV. Finally, all participants must submit a case study that quantifies their application of CCV. The case studies are also shared within the team to leverage the opportunity for social learning.