Kimball Midwest Pivots Training to Overcome COVID-19 Challenges

• Last month, Kimball Midwest announced it was one of 59 organizations honored as part of Chief Learning Officer’s 11th LearningElite Awards program.

• Like many distributors, Kimball Midwest had to completely revamp its in-person training and development programs to virtual video conference last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

• One of the key reasons Kimball Midwest’s training and development programs are successful is the support from ownership and its executive leadership team.

Kimball Midwest has historically emphasized training and development programs, which paid off not only during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in the form of national recognition for those programs this year. Kimball Midwest, ranked No. 15 on MDM’s 2020 list of the Top 40 Distributors for MRO, is a family-owned national distributor that traces its roots back to 1923. The company takes pride in its training and development programs. On its website, Kimball Midwest said its sales representatives have an average of seven years with the company. 

Last month, Kimball Midwest announced it was one of 59 organizations honored as part of Chief Learning Officer’s 11th LearningElite Awards program. It was the first time that Kimball Midwest was named to the list. Other organizations that were also honored included Cardinal Health, PepsiCo and Columbia Sportswear.

That award followed on the heels of Columbus, Ohio-based Kimball Midwest being ranked No. 84 nationally this year in Trading magazine’s Training Top 100 after previously being ranked No. 111 in 2020. 

The Training Top 100 ranking was based on benchmarking statistics and a range of qualitative and quantitative factors, including total training budget, scope of training programs provided, detailed formal and informal training programs, training being linked to business goals and business outcomes resulting from training.

Lastly, like many distributors, Kimball Midwest had to completely revamp its in-person training and development programs to virtual video conference last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

MDM talked with Kimball Midwest Director of Sales Development Kate Callison about working through the COVID-19 challenges, the types of training programs Kimball Midwest offers to its employees and what’s on the training and development roadmap going forward. 

MDM: Were you surprised when you found out that Kimball Midwest was named to the Training Top 100 list? 

Callison: The Training 100, which we won for the first time last year, was a big surprise to us then. It was really the first time we had ever had that experience of being recognized nationally. We got a lot of great feedback from them that we hope to learn from. The way that our training team collaborates, I’m not at all surprised that they were able to accomplish this. It’s just great getting that kind of recognition for all of their hard work. That reinforcement to them that, “Hey, what you’re doing not only works in our culture, and is great for Kimball Midwest, but it’s also best practices nationally and in all kinds of training organizations.”

We were pretty excited about [ranking No. 84] because it is a national award, not just Columbus or Ohio, and across all different kinds of industries. The great part is I think we have a lot we can learn from the other companies that received the awards to continue to improve our training programs and our development programs, and at the end of the day, help the bottom line and company results.

MDM: Other winners included Pepsi and Columbia. Kimball Midwest is in some pretty good company there.

Callison: We are. It feels like we’re in a whole new club, which is great. Those companies have a ton of resources and a ton of support behind them. I think that we’ve got a lot of great resources, and more than anything we have the commitment from our executive leadership and the ownership of the company. They are incredibly supportive of all of the development initiatives. That really is our starting point with all of it. 

The owners of the company are so committed to the programs and reinforcing learning that they come into our new hire workshops and do a bit of the training themselves. They introduce the company’s mission, vision and values with all of our new hires. Their level of commitment and support really sets the tone for a continuously learning culture.

MDM: When did the training and development programs start at Kimball Midwest?

Callison: We’ve been in business since 1923, so I’m not going to say that we recently started these by any means. Our selling programs we’ve had for decades now. The training and resources behind them we really started focusing on improving them even more within the past five years or so. And the results have just taken off. 

We’ve doubled and tripled some of our development goals just by focusing on what we call a journey-based development program, where we’re delivering the right content to the right person at the right point in their career where it can be most impactful to them. 

We have to do a really comprehensive job at identifying what those key activities and results are for each role, and then develop the resources behind them and offer them at the right time. It’s a continuously evolving and improving program. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to say, “OK, we’re done. We’ve cracked the code, and this is all we can do.”

MDM: You mentioned sales, but it’s targeted at other employees as well?

Callison: Yes. We offer selling programs, and then resources to support them for our sales associates. We have another journey for our sales managers. For internal associates, we create customized personal development plans for them based on the role, skill set, and what they want to do. It’s really tailored to each person. I might have a personal development plan that’s very different from my counterpart in marketing.

MDM: What impact has Kimball Midwest seen from the training and development programs?

Callison: It’s been pretty amazing. For example, we have a first month program that we use to reinforce behavior for our sales force to help them understand what to do when they call on one of our customers. We’ve grown from maybe 11% participation and success with it to right around a 98%-plus success rate. This gets new associates started off on the right path to success. 

MDM: How did the pandemic impact the training and development programs?

Callison: We had to pivot hard. The pandemic was the biggest challenge that our learning and development team had ever faced. We had to quickly understand the challenges and adjust and adapt. We did that by playing to our strengths. 

For our training team, that meant leveraging the knowledge and cumulative experience of all of our trainers, which is over 150 years when you add up all of their time in the MRO industry. Prior to the pandemic, more than 80% of all of our training and development work was live and in person. It involved bringing people to Columbus, where we’re headquartered, or to Dallas, Reno, or Savannah, where we have distribution centers. We have training centers in every one of those. We relied heavily on, “Let’s get on the plane and all get together in a room.” 

That changed dramatically and quickly on March 23, 2020. Our first step in accomplishing all of this was figuring out how to use the tools to conduct virtual training through [Cisco] Webex or [Microsoft] Teams, which our training group had done minimally before that. Then we made sure that we pivoted all of our existing trainings to virtual so everything was still available to all of our sales force and internal associates. 

It was also looking at, “OK, we’ve got a whole new environment here, and there’s a lot of change going on, how can we further adjust and adapt and create content that’s relevant for right now that’s going to help our associates and our customers get through this?” 

We created some new selling tools. We created some new relevant content. One class in particular, called “Selling Through Adversity” was specifically tailored for what was happening around us. Our sales force was used to calling on customers in person, but in a lot of areas that became incredibly difficult. They’re not always naturally phone people, but we helped them understand how to best communicate with their customers. How they could find out from their customers what their new needs were and how Kimball Midwest could support them. 

Our sales team was great about funneling that information back to us so that we could, in real time, build training content to help support them. I think they did an amazing job. By June [2020], we were back to 2019 sales levels, and growing from there. 

The challenge this year is the competitive job market that we’re encountering now. I’m hoping that some of our success and training support, and maybe even some of the training awards we’ve received, will be able to illustrate to potential candidates how great we are at supporting our people.

MDM: Going forward, will it be a mix of in-person and virtual training? 

Callison: The lessons learned from this year and last year are going to inform what we’ll be doing for years to come. Things like really understanding what the key components are of not just our training content, but also our training delivery methods, and how we can be the most effective in using those delivery methods are going to be a huge part of what we do. 

It was certainly a trying time, but we really did have a lot of fun creating new content for these unprecedented situations that we’ve had. We’ve got a wish list now of some content that will help the sales force as well as internal employees that we’re planning on working on throughout the rest of this year. [The pandemic] really forced us to put our creative thinking hats on, and I don’t think we want to take those off.

MDM: What advice would you give to other distributors that want to start similar programs?

Callison: The best training and development professionals are people who are eager to learn themselves. If our training team had not been so willing and excited to dive in and learn the new technology, learn new ways of communicating, and put together new content for our sales team, we wouldn’t have been as successful as we were. 

I also think being open to learning from people who are subject-matter experts is important. One of our favorite things to do is for our trainers go out in the field and spend a day, or sometimes a week, with a successful sales representative and learn why they are so successful, develop content around that and share it with other folks. Those are the best pieces of advice that we have.