Sciens Building Solution Grows Core Business and Protects Margins

Sciens Building Solutions, backed by The Carlyle Group, is a national fire and life safety and security company focused on protecting lives and reducing business risk. This includes the design, installation, and provision of maintenance and inspection services for fire detection, fire sprinkler and security systems.

Sciens delivers complete life safety solutions for its customers––from the smallest elementary school to the largest hospital campus or tallest skyscraper. With thousands of systems installed over decades, Sciens sales team, engineers, installers, and highly trained technicians provide the most effective solutions possible.

Over the past five years, Sciens has grown from 6 divisions to 32 divisions. With growth came a need to train new hires effectively and reduce turnover to keep high-performing teams in place.

Sciens turned to The Brooks Group to deliver our award-winning IMPACT Selling^® training to equip service sales reps with consultative selling skills. They also implemented the Brooks Talent Index^® hiring assessment to reduce turnover. This comprehensive evaluation combines multiple tools to measure and analyze sales professionals’ ability to sell, interpersonal skills, resilience, and goal-orientation.

The Brooks Group’s sales effectiveness experts designed a program to meet Sciens’ specific training needs and objectives, including:

• Learning how to confidently position new payment terms to reinforce customer value 
• Proactively addressing and navigating common objections related to payment terms 
• Practice positioning and objection-handling strategies to communicate effectively 

Sciens’ service business is the company’s core. “We sell products and we sell solutions. But the service business is really what drives the company’s success. Having a large contract base gives us the opportunity for additional pull-through business,” said Fink.

Sciens reps who sell service contracts frequently hear that prospects are happy with their current vendor and don’t need to talk to them. The challenge is to keep them on the phone.

IMPACT is an acronym for a six-step process: Investigate, Meet, Probe, Apply, Convince, and Tie-It-Up. In the third step, sellers learn to ask probing, open-ended questions that uncover customer wants and needs. This had a huge impact on seller effectiveness.

“Eventually, if you ask the right questions, you’ll find an issue they don’t tell you about right away,” said Fink. “Maybe it’s a billing issue, or maybe their current provider doesn’t show up on time.” 

Not all of the new hires selling service contracts have industry-related experience. In some cases, they are recent college graduates that have never gone through professional sales training. Sciens conducts internal sales training for both solutions and service sales reps, but takes it a step further by sending all of their service sales reps to IMPACT training after their first 90 days in the role. 

Sciens was experiencing some turnover with their service sales reps before adding The Brooks Group assessment to the hiring process.  

“Turnover is a lose-lose, right? It’s a lose for the employee because they’re moving on, and it’s a lose for the company because we’ve invested six months of time and effort into our reps.” 

“Managers were hiring people, and six months in, I find out the person’s left, either voluntarily or involuntarily,” said Fink. When he followed up to find out what happened, in most cases the manager didn’t really know why, so we decided to take a more proactive approach.” 

That approach included vetting candidates more thoroughly and requiring assessments as part of the sales candidate screening process. 

“We’re looking for the work ethic and perseverance from candidates. It’s just finding the right person that possesses those aforementioned skills and attributes.” 

Sciens sales managers are impressed by the depth of information in the assessments, especially the proprietary IMPACT Selling Skills Index, which measures sales competencies. The Brooks Group consultants also debrief each manager and point out areas of development and any red flags that might become issues later. 

“The Brooks Group helped our service sales reps become more productive in a much quicker fashion. Training improved their overall performance as far as their order intake. And the assessments definitely helped us find the right candidates and hire the best people for the job.”

The company saw a 20x return on its investment in training and its service sales reps have seen significant gains, including 5 additional sales per rep since their training, while also seeing:

Learn more about IMPACT Selling consultative sales skills training from The Brooks Group.