Strategy Development Takes a Higher Ed Approach to Dealer Education

Tom Callinan

Two weeks ago Strategy Development introduced sd|University, timing the introduction to coincide with ITEX. In case you missed the original announcement, which can be found in the April News Bytes section of The Week in Imaging, Sd|University is described by Strategy Development as an innovate approach to training a dealer’s entire staff. Its executive education curriculum includes the full suite of programs Strategy Development has presented to dealers during the last five years with the addition of programs to help dealers continue to transform ahead of the industry. Sd|University offers the following programs:

• SD Business Planning and Operational Excellence Workshop, designed as a “mini MBA” in running an imaging company for senior management. This class takes the industry model deep into the 21st Century.
• SD Service Management University
• SD Strategic Sales Management Workshop
• SD Advanced Enterprise Selling Skills
• SD Managed Service Workshop
• SD Fundamentals of Managed Print Services Workshop
• SD Advanced Managed Print Services Workshop
• SD Financial Selling Skills

This week we finally caught up with the Dean of sd|University and President of Strategy Development Tom Callinan. We would have loved to have connected sooner, but during the past two weeks he’s been racking up frequent flyer miles visiting dealers and presenting seminars at the Kyocera Document Solutions conference and ITEX. In this interview Callinan delves deeper into what sd|University is all about and what it has to offer the dealer community.

Strategy Development has been educating the dealer community for six years so what’s the big deal about this announcement and how different is this from what you’ve been doing all along?

Callinan: To understand the substance of the announcement you first have to look at how dealers educate their employees today. There are numerous training organizations that spend their time in the copier industry, some stay around for years and others for a matter of months. Each training company, usually one person, offers their version of training in a particular subject matter. To attend their class you usually pay a per-student fee. A dealer realizes that their four sales employees need to improve their skills and they pay $1,500 for each person to attend a sales training course. But to train their four sales people it requires a fairly sizable one month investment of $6,000. The dealer isn’t sure about two of the reps; should they invest $3,000 to train them when they might not make it? Should the dealer wait another two months before making the decision?

If the dealer invested the $3,000 would it give the sales reps a better chance of success? That training expense becomes a major decision yet a decision that could be critical to the employee’s success, and ultimately the success of the dealership. Because most training companies don’t have the necessary experience or staff to train in different areas of the business you might send your sales employees to one training company and your sales manager to a different company and maybe your executives to completely different training company. Each of the employees comes back with their version of what is the correct approach, yet the three employees may have been given three completely different roadmaps to success. The dealer’s training dollars are wasted as they can’t decided which approach to take, or worse they choose the wrong approach because the trainer didn’t really have the experience required in the space where they were training.

So sd|University addresses these issues via a tuition-based approach and a full suite of training programs? Specifically, how are you pricing this?

Callinan: We all like budgets and that is exactly what sd|Universty provides through a tuition program which gives a dealership access to our entire suite of offerings for one monthly fee. The dealer principal no longer needs to consider whether or not to invest in your employees’ education. They can pay the dealership’s annual tuition and send as many employees as necessary to any or all of the training classes. Dealers can enjoy all of sd|University’s class options for one fixed fee and the fee will be billed monthly to make attendance even easier.

In your press release you note that even a small dealer will save tens of thousands of dollars over competitive training options and receive more educational offerings. How so?

Callinan: To see a competitive pricing comparison visit www.strategydevelopment.com/competitivepricing.

I understand your clients get preferential pricing and you’re also flexible in the how you’re structuring your courses?

Callinan: In addition to the company tuition plan, opening all of the training programs for a dealer’s employees, sd|University will offer a lower investment for individual participants and a 25 percent discount for clients of Strategy Development consulting. For larger dealers SD will offer training at the dealer’s location for a set fee, eliminating travel expenses for multiple attendees.

This concept sounds like a simple enough approach to training; one would have thought somebody would have built something like this sooner?

Callinan: The reason Strategy Development can pull this off is that we have the staff experience to truly make the tuition approach a strong value to the dealer community. Having experience in finance, service, sales, and business management at all levels, from owning a dealership to managing $1-billion businesses, makes the team at Strategy Development uniquely qualified to offer a tuition-based educational experience with a suite of educational programs from business management through service management and advanced sales skills.

That may sound like a commercial, but for an organization that is as prominent as Strategy Development at dealer-oriented events and within the dealer community it seems like you’re well positioned to make a go of it with this new training model.

Callinan: Given the quantity of courses and Strategy Development’s long tenure of offering highly acclaimed industry educational programs it is something definitely worth considering.

Where exactly is the campus of sd|University located?

Callinan: That’s a great questions Scott.  I’d like to say in bucolic Cambridge, Mass, near another well-known university, but the fact is that the campus is rotated around the country at various facilities, a model we’ve used successfully for the last six years. We want to make it easy and inexpensive for a dealer to send their employees to our programs so we rotate the classes in cities like San Francisco, Irvine, Dallas, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Charlotte. We use some of our partner facilities, like our service management university being held at EverBank’s offices in New Jersey in May and our MPS classes being held at Supplies Network’s facility in June . We are holding both of our MPS classes in San Francisco in May as well. We’ll be publishing a calendar with the class schedule and location on our Website.

How can a dealer learn more about the program?

Callinan: Visit www.sd-university.com.