It starts with the turnover increase targets agreed with the customer. It then goes on to study the customer’s current business systems, analysing the processes and breaking them down into micro-processes. Then procedures, equipment, quality standards and various inputs are reviewed. It concludes with the training of salespeople on a platform or in the classroom and with coaching in the field.

The pattern is always the same: measurable objectives, analysis of numbers, processes and people. Practical training and coaching in the shop, where, surprisingly, we also bring in actors, trainers, who pretend to be customers.

Call centres are always in our hearts, because the Feeling & Sales method was created to turn call centres into feel centres, and with this method our customers have achieved great results.

The method is taught to telephone operators, with little theory and much practice. The main teaching tool is not slides, but the telephone pair, which allows a lecturer and an operator, both on headphones in contact with real customers.

Even in call centres we use actors, i.e. trainers who make phone calls playing the part of the customer, polite, rude, know-it-all, aggressive, depressed, etc. After the call they comment on the result and consolidate the learning.

The best thing is that a few motivated operators trained in the Feel Method operate within a call centre as a mother yeast, becoming tutors to other learners. In fact, let us say that if one does not become the tutor of another colleague, one’s learning path cannot be called finished.

One starts with a product or service to be sold and studies its characteristics. For each characteristic, a set of benefits for the customer is systematically identified. These benefits (i.e. how the customer’s life changes if he buys the product or service) are visualised, i.e. turned into images, with a vision board, or video clips. Then we simulate with actors the relationship between customer and seller, who must propose to the customer the benefits, not the features, of the product/service. Finally we make a sales plan and go selling with the trainees.

Our learning and gaming platform can be customised for our customers, incorporating the content most useful to the customer, as well as their logo and colours.

The customised platform is co-designed with the customer and his employees, who learn how to assemble the various components, as if they were IKEA furniture, and how to use them.

Before starting out, however, we do a feasibility study that shows what economic benefits the customer will gain from the platform, how he will be able to use his platform not only in training, but also as a marketing tool, with which subsidised or non-repayable funding he will be able to purchase it.

We are sales experts, method experts, not industry experts. Companies have the sales skills in-house to increase sales, but they often don’t use them, and we help them to do so, quickly and cheaply. Sometimes all it takes is to analyse in detail what a company’s top performer salespeople do, format their working methods, teach them to low performers who become medium performers, and then turn the medium performers into top performers who mentor other salespeople, cascading.

We start with the Sales Equation V = need/dream – Effort – Risk – Price, a simple equation, as are the equations of Newton, Bernoulli, Faraday, Clausius and Einstein, equations that changed the world, on which we produced the film La Direzione del Tempo for RAI Cinema. Link to Trailer

But mathematics also allows us to predict the business results of 50, 100, 1,000 salesmen by analysing a statistically significant sample of them, say 20 out of 1,000, drawing the Gaussian curve of their performance.  Then we act on the other 980, first by tightening the Gaussian, i.e. smoothing their working methods, and then, at a later stage, moving it to the right in the graph. It sounds complicated, but it is not if you work with method, mathematical tools and clear ideas.

To make an offer we have to make an analysis and study the client’s numbers, processes and people. The analysis is non-invasive, the approach is structured, it wastes the client’s time and ends with a 90-minute presentation in which we tell the client how much and how they will improve their results with a Feel Centre project. Normally in a company of 200 people we interview 10 of them for 45 minutes.

Interestingly, already during the analysis the customer notices an improvement, and often we do not even know why this happens.

Feel Center is a film company and therefore uses films, video clips, feature films for training. For example, for problem solving projects we involve the teams in the interpretation of theatrical or cinematographic texts that recall the problem: they write the screenplay for a film on the subject, shoot the video inside and outside the company, proceed with editing and post-production. With this method, the company equips itself with a videolibrary of problems, and solutions, generated from within.

Another example is the use of Virtual Reality: virtual reality stations with Oculus visors, on which participants engage in virtual experience in simulation, earning points, and recording everything on tablets. Viewing of films, feedback, proclamation of the best tutorial produced by the students. The work is narrated with professional video footage and a window on social media.

We shoot 12 double films, in which the typical customer relationship situation is filmed in the NO version, showing how not to do it, and in the YES version, using principles and techniques for respect and emotional involvement of customers.

Many entrepreneurs write a book about their company, touching on topics such as company credo, history, strengths, training, etc.

Feel Centre can translate a book into a film or web series, which is useful for communicating values that should not be lost.

The film can be made at zero cost for the client company and the audiovisual product would also, and above all, be an internal and external training tool, and could be included in an internal Academy, i.e. in a digital learning platform that we could build on demand.

We start by defining the problem the customer is asking us to solve and measuring its economic consequences. Problems often involve the need to remedy them, but remedies are expensive and do not eliminate the root of the problem, which is often more than one, and it is difficult to identify the main one. Solutions eliminate the root of the problem, but the problem may reoccur.

Only with prevention can the root of the problem no longer recur.

We take the client to identify the root of the problem and the prevention systems (contractual, governance, procedural, smart contract, artificial intelligence, blockchain, others).

Before a problem solving project we can take people to the theatre to watch our No Problem show. After the project we install a Corrective Action procedure in the company.

Our innovation projects are aimed at innovating our customers’ products/services, but also processes, e.g. sales processes.

We create innovation workshops in which we use our Creativity Machine, a theatrical machine (we do business theatre) that connects tools and needs, using a method (the structure of the machine) and wheels of discovery. All with great teamwork.

Feel Center was founded in 2014 as an innovative start-up and is now an innovative SME, and has also published a playbook for entrepreneurs entitled Life Choices, because making a start-up is a life choice.

We assist entrepreneurs in preparing the business plan, defining the product and service, always starting with the needs of the customers. Over the years we have found that start-ups often fail for two reasons: it is not clear who is in charge, they focus on the product instead of the customer.

See in this regard our cartoon How NOT to make a start-up.