With the pace of LED retrofits quickening, the lighting industry is in more of a “race to the sockets” today than ever before. The stakes are high for IMARK members, whose customers are constantly approached by a whirlwind of retrofit vendors vying for their business. Moreover, once those sockets are retrofitted to LEDs, the revenue opportunity they represent will be dormant for several years due to the expected longevity of those upgrades.
IMARK is committed to making its members more successful at capturing their fair share of this lighting retrofit revenue. In support of that objective, IMARK Group has appointed Selling Energy as a member service provider to the IMARK Group membership.
The president of Selling Energy is Mark Jewell. Jewell is an award-winning, energy solutions-focused sales trainer and bestselling author on the subject. He actually started his energy career retrofitting millions of square feet of lighting back in the early 1990s when T8s and electronic ballasts first arrived in the United States. After that, he created a company that filed rebate applications for clients representing more than two billion square feet of North American real estate and saw plenty of lighting retrofits in that role as well. In 2012, after having witnessed three billion square feet of energy projects over a span of two decades, Jewell came to the conclusion that most energy professionals are in fact “accidental salespeople.” Sensing an opportunity to correct that situation and drive more project approvals, he co-founded the Efficiency Sales Professional Institute. Since then, more than 1,000 energy professionals have taken his award-winning weeklong Boot Camp, and thousands more have taken his one- and two-day workshops, like the ones IMARK sponsored in Chicago and Baltimore over the last two years. His formula for sales success in energy settings certainly struck a chord. Jewell’s book, Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas to Get More Projects Approved!, quickly became a Wall Street Journal and Amazon bestseller. His company, Selling Energy, was recently ranked as one of the Top 20 Sales Training Companies in the United States by Selling Power Magazine. Many of those who have heard Jewell speak, read his book or received his oneon- one coaching report great success in applying his selling principles.
And Now, There’s Selling in 6™—Stay Home and Learn
Jewell’s latest venture, which he calls “Selling in 6™,” is a revolutionary approach to teaching people how to sell energy projects. This program takes dozens of hours of award-winning training and boils them down to six-minute lessons (hence the name “Selling in 6™”). Each lesson addresses a single “big idea” and can be viewed on any smartphone, tablet or other internet-connected device. Lessons can also be searched by title or keyword and revisited at any time during the Selling in 6™ subscription period.
When IMARK Now asked Jewell why he created this new program, his answers made a lot of sense. “We’ve been fortunate to have thousands of people benefit from our energy-focused professional sales training,” Jewell said, “and they report wonderful successes in applying what we teach. In fact, plenty of our graduates have doubled or tripled their income, become top producers in their company, won big sales awards and the like. However, for every person I’ve taught so far, there are probably a hundred more who could also benefit. In fact, I could teach hundred-person workshops every day of the week, every week of the year and still not reach the majority of folks who could benefit from this material. I’m just one person. I realized that we needed to get scale. And to do that, we either needed to franchise our training or go the mobilelearning route. Since mobile learning yields so many other advantages for today’s adult learners, it was an easy decision to go the smartphone/tablet route.”
True to Jewell’s point, countless surveys show that today’s professionals (particularly millennials) prefer to learn on their mobile devices, rather than being tied to a classroom or even to their desks watching longer videos. As its logo proclaims, Selling in 6™ takes a “drip-irrigation” approach— delivering hundreds of award-winning, field-proven, revenue-building sales ideas at a pace that the learners themselves control.
Moreover, unfurling the lessons one at a time not only enhances comprehension, but also increases the likelihood that learners will actually apply what they learn. Jewell mentioned that folks often remark how much their heads spin after attending one of his fast-paced, weeklong Boot Camps. He said the good news is that despite the “firehydrant” pace, they generally remember at least 25 percent of what they heard, and that even if they apply only 10 percent, they dramatically increase their revenues. Jewell said that with his six-minute drip-irrigation approach, learners should retain the majority of what they hear, which will dramatically increase this training’s impact over the long term.
Selling in 6™ comes in three editions: Silver (60 lessons), Gold (120 lessons) and Platinum (300+ lessons). Most lessons feature questions that check for understanding or challenge the learner to apply what they just learned to real-life selling situations.
A Sales Manager’s Dream
The Selling in 6™ training system was designed with sales leaders in mind. Imagine providing the equivalent of 30 or more hours of energy-focused professional sales training, six minutes at a time, with no calendar coordination... no travel time or expense...no training venue, catering or audio-visual expenses...and perhaps most importantly, no lost time in the field.
One of the objections sales managers often raise with any training that’s not “in-person” is, “How can I be sure my people are paying attention? What if they’re multi-tasking, listening to the training in the background while futzing with their email?” Frankly, 
it’s a legitimate concern. How can you justify a training investment to your chief financial officer when you’re not sure your salespeople are even paying attention?
To address that specific issue, Selling in 6™ not only generates viewing reports that are automatically emailed to the training sponsor, but also collects the answers to questions posed throughout the curriculum, so it’s easy to verify that learners are engaged, which helps justify that training investment.
One of the other factors that caused Jewell to offer a mobile-learning version of his award-winning training was that sales teams are constantly churning. “I’d see sales managers bring a fraction of their sales teams to one of our trainings,” Jewell said, “only to slap their foreheads wishing that they had brought everyone...And the following month, they would hire two new salespeople, who also missed the training that their ‘scouts’ had received. The manager would ask me, ‘So when are you coming back to town so I can get the rest of my people in front of you?’ I knew that if we had a mobile-learning approach, we could help sales managers get everyone singing from the same songbook quickly and cost-effectively–and do so without having to take anyone out of the field. And using Selling in 6™ for onboarding makes perfect sense because it allows sales managers to get new hires pulling their own weight and contributing to deal flow sooner.”
And speaking of getting everyone singing from the same songbook, Selling in 6™ can be private-labeled (in case a distributor wants to make their contractors both more successful and more loyal customers). A lighting manufacturer could add custom six-minute lessons on their products to the typical Silver, Gold or Platinum edition playlist. Selling in 6™ can also send six-minute 
lessons in email nurturing campaigns to sales staff or even to internal champions within customer organizations. Imagine having a Wall Street Journal bestselling author break it to your prospect (in the form of a six-minute lesson viewed by clicking a hyperlink in an email) that “simple payback” is a terrible yardstick to use? Or that once you add the non-utility-cost financial benefits like lower-scrap rate or higher productivity to the denominator of the simple payback period calculation, a four-year payback is now a three-month payback? All that and more is possible with a flexible mobile learning solution.
“We’ve read our members’ post-training testimonials and heard of the great success they’ve enjoyed in the wake of taking the Lighting Sales Managers workshops that IMARK sponsored in 2016 and 2017,” said Steve Ruane, IMARK vice president of marketing and member services. “We’re excited to see the release of the new Selling in 6™ offering, and we’re confident it will help our members and manufacturer partners become more successful harnessing the huge opportunity that lighting retrofits represent.”
For more information on Selling in 6™, visit sellingenergy.com.