West Unified Communications identified the need to prepare our high potential Sales Reps for the next level of their career. With that in mind, we created the LEAD (Leader Engagement and Development) Program. LEAD is a multi-faceted program that spans over a period of several months. The employees taking part in the program had to be nominated by sales leadership. This program is a blended approach cohort to learning utilizing eLearning content, the opportunity to mentor, interaction with peers and sharing their learning experience in facilitated roundtable discussions. The goal of this program is to arm our Sales Reps with the essential skills needed to drive their career to the next level and better prepare them when an opportunity for promotion becomes available.

In this session we will take you through how the LEAD program was developed from conception to completion. We will highlight the eLearning and web conferencing solutions used as well has how we utilized our LMS, our internal executive sponsorship and involvement, scheduling for a geographically dispersed sales force, setting up a mentorship program, how we facilitated our roundtable discussions and our end results, including testing and re-purposing for different departments.

• Executive involvement is key
• You have to be flexible in the approach – make changes as they are needed
• Not every high potential performer wanted to take the next step into management
• The use of technology was imperative for program success