Well, that was an interesting visit to Sandfords this morning.Yes, I'd really like to get the contract with them. They'd be an excellent company for our portfolio.Absolutely. Talking to the department managers was extremely useful. How did you get on in discussion with the senior management team?A similar experience, very informative. I was impressed. They're operating in a highly competitive market, yet they're totally committed to investment in training.Not all companies take that view, of course, especially when the economy is on a downturn.Quite. Sandfords' view is long-term. Instead of being satisfied that they're already known as a good company to work for, they want their management programmes to create an established, committed team and keep those people in the company. The staff I spoke to had plenty to say about the training they received in the past. So did the senior managers. As you probably found out, they've always tried to run their own in-house programmes before, using the knowledge areas of a number of their own personnel. They were very keen for management training to be attended by all managers. Of course, they rarely succeeded in getting everyone together at the same time. Sessions kept getting cancelled and people were generally irritated by the changes to arrangements, though those sessions that did take place were well received, especially ones on the more specialist topics. Yes, the middle managers I interviewed commented that they'd like training to cover more specialist areas. To be honest, though, I think they're involved in such a lot of training of new and existing junior staff that they don't fully appreciate the benefits of receiving training themselves.Could be challenging for us then?Yes. Whilst welcoming the efforts of senior management, one of the marketing managers I spoke to was quite open about his and his colleagues' views. He made the point that there was a widespread feeling that the motivation behind this new programme wasn't clear. They thought it might be used as a way to assess their performance. Because of that, they hadn't been able to make up their minds either way about whether they were in favour. OK, well, let's think about the content of the programme. Right, well we must include sessions on the areas they've actually asked for. Let's have a look. Customer care and presentation techniques were certainly on their list. Didn't some of them mention negotiating skills as well?OK, let's kick off with what they identified as their priority areas. So we could do presentation techniques this time round and then put forward a proposal for sessions on negotiating skills and customer care and anything else they might want in the future. That sounds good. We'll go with that. We should have more chance like that of fitting in with people's availability. Well, the company always tried for residential courses at weekends before. I gather that wasn't popular. Also, the managers I spoke to weren't keen to come into work even earlier for training sessions. Well, if we start off with a series of full-day events during work time, I think that'd be best. Yes, sessions early in the morning would be too short. We wouldn't achieve much. OK, we'll propose that. Did you discuss when we'd start? I suggested March. I'd have liked to get this contract underway before the end of our financial year, and we're already quite booked up from the end of May onwards.Don't they have a big launch coming up in the first week of April? Yes, they said March will be hectic, so as soon as the launch is over and they've had a week to clear up would fit in best. OK. So what needs to be done next? Shall we put together a proposed schedule?We'll need to do that soon. For now, we've got to get on with devising a survey to go out to everyone included in the programme. We can start working on costings to send to their senior management as soon as we've done that. OK, let's just.

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