Coventry University, Faculty of Art & Humanities: Ideas for Selling
“The work Glued have done has spurred my team on to not only promote and sell existing programmes and offerings but also to initiate new ones.”
Helen Cuthill, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Coventry University.
Context: Every university has to generate income from sources other than student fees. One of the ways they do this is by harnessing the individual, combined or blended capabilities of its academics to provide valuable services, training or consultancy to business.
Part of the challenge here is identifying the need and finding a way of servicing it from university resources. This is a task in itself and once the facility to serve is established a commercial facing team are generally charged with marketing and selling those services.
In an arts and humanities faculty these challenges are complicated by the apparent contradiction between the nature of their subjects and commerce.
The Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry University presented just such a challenge. How to put together the ‘arguments’ to successfully convince businesses of buying-into the services offered.
The requirement: In partnership with Helen Cuthill, Associate Dean at the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, Glued put together a workshop for the newly formed commercial team.
This would be based around Simon Sinek’s ‘What, How, Why’. Examining how that can be used to build a proposition. Running through an example from each of the team members. In each case working towards a proposition that highlighted the valuable difference of each service being considered.
The outputs: Glued conducted the workshop during the course of an afternoon. With four attendees, the new team were taken through the methodology for picking apart an offer identifying what within it would be of value to the target audience and how to express that valuable difference. Prior to the workshop each participant was asked to bring along a sample service offering to practice on.
In the workshop each example was debated and the methodology applied to distil the valuable difference and how to express that.
The results: Aside from positive feedback on the workshop itself we were pleased to hear from Helen Cuthill that six months later the same techniques are still being used to put together the sales and marketing for existing and new service offerings from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities.