Training Program Design
Increasing sales conversions through a full team retraining — identifying the performance gap, building the solution, and driving measurable results.
The Challenge
The sales teams worked exclusively with inbound leads — no cold outreach, no prospecting. Every lead had to be filtered through a Leads Management team responsible for assigning each one to the right sales rep. When conversion rates dipped, the root cause wasn't the sales team.
A routing rule was already in place: move size determined which team received the lead, with smaller moves going to inside sales and larger, more complex moves going to the onsite team. But the Leads Management team wasn't gathering enough information to apply it correctly — mismatching lead types to the wrong reps and creating friction before a single sales conversation even started.
On top of that, the onsite team's schedules were generating excessive travel time between appointments, leaving no bandwidth for follow-up or inbound calls from active prospects.
Core insight: Conversion problems aren't always a sales problem. In this case, the bottleneck was upstream — in how leads were being qualified and assigned before they ever reached a rep.
The Solution
The fix had two layers: reinforcing the existing routing structure and introducing a new qualification process to make it actually work.
The existing framework assigned leads based on two variables that remained in place: move size determined which team got the lead (inside sales for smaller moves, onsite team for larger and more complex ones), and rep experience level determined which rep within each team received it.
What was missing was a reliable way to gather that information. The key change was training the Leads Management team to ask the right qualifying questions — quickly and naturally, without making the customer feel like they were being interrogated. Those questions had one goal: determine whether the move warranted an onsite visit or could be handled entirely by phone.
To solve the travel time problem for the onsite team, a geographic constraint was added: each rep could only be booked within a single NYC borough per day, eliminating cross-borough travel and opening time for follow-up and inbound calls.
The Training
New policies only work if the people executing them understand them. The Leads Management team needed to be fully retrained — not just informed — on both the routing logic and the qualification process that made it functional.
The core of the training focused on the qualifying conversation: which questions to ask, how to sequence them efficiently, and how to read the answers to make a confident routing decision. The goal was a team that could gather what they needed in the first few minutes of a call without slowing down or frustrating the customer.
In its original form, the training was delivered through PowerPoint and in-person instruction. To demonstrate the same content with modern instructional design tools, I rebuilt the introductory module in Articulate Storyline — creating an interactive e-learning experience where learners receive the new policies and practice applying them in real scenarios as they go.
The Storyline version uses branching scenarios and immediate feedback to reinforce decision-making, rather than passive slide-reading. It's designed to be completed independently, making it scalable for onboarding future team members without requiring live facilitation every time.
Experience the CourseThe Results
Beyond the numbers, the retraining created a repeatable system. New hires could be onboarded to the same policies using the same materials, reducing ramp time and maintaining consistency as the team grew.