The Marketplace Situation

For companies adopting category management as a business strategy, their first step is usually to generate and gather category information into a category platform or resource tool. This new tool is extremely valuable to the sales people, but only if they are also given the new skills and processes to use it effectively. The analogy would be spending thousands of dollars on notebook computers for your sales people, and then not giving them training on how to use them.

The Compass Solution

The Category Management Implementation Workshop is for companies that want to gain competitive advantage through this high impact strategy.

Compass Management Group's Category Management training provides your sales people the process for using category management with their customers, the new skills to make them successful and the knowledge to give them confidence. Whether you are just beginning with category management or have already created your category platform, Category Management Implementation Workshop witll dramatically improve the business results!

The program is specifically targeted towards national account managers, key account managers, and category management managers with responsibility for progressive, category management-focused accounts.

Workshop Learning Objectives

As a result of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Understand why category management is an essential strategy for them and their company
2. Utilize the category management process with key accounts
3. Prioritize accounts to focus effort and resources against high potential customers
4. Penetrate key accounts and identify business issues and needs
5. Secure the position of category manager with the key customers
6. Diagnose customers’ business needs in their categories
7. Develop and present category management recommendations to customers
8. Implement category management recommendations and evaluate results

Timing and Size

The workshop length is one and one half days. The ideal scenario is to schedule the workshop at the same time as you introduce your category platform or category information. This enables your account managers to see how the information, or tool, and the skills work together. Two full days are required if the company’s category platform is included in the training.

The ideal workshop size is 14 to 16 participants. This allows for maximum involvement in the process and learning. The minimum workshop size is 12 participants.