In an 18-year career at Forum Corp., the Boston-based training company, Sarene Byrne has advanced from an account executive in New Jersey to executive vice president and head of the company’s Learning System Division, the major wing of the company that customizes training programs for major corporations, including Dynamic Selling, a sales program, and Leadership for sales managers.

In the span of time Byrne has been with the company, it has grown from $3 million to $65 million in annual sales, thanks in part to her dynamic sales and managerial skills.

“When I came to Forum, I knew three things,” she says. “I could teach, I could sell and I could manage.” Byrne had been a schoolteacher and a fund raiser, where she developed skills that would make her successful at selling. As a teacher of grades one through four, she learned to present ideas to children, which translated into sales presentation skills later on. And as a fund raiser, she learned to manage volunteers, which helped her develop sales managerial skills. “When you’re managing volunteers, you have to understand the special skills of each one and put them in the right jobs and motivate them,” she says. “Managing salespeople is also about bringing out the best in each person.”

The background has worked well at Forum, where as an account executive she began selling sales training, management and leadership development programs to a variety of Fortune 1000 companies, including PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson and General Electric.

She went on to head Forum’s Eastern Division and today leads an international team of 42 sales reps and 7 division managers who are stationed on 3 continents – North America, Europe and Asia.

All three continents came into play for a program Byrne coordinated for American Express that sought to standardize the way its products were sold around the world. The task was difficult because there were three different product groups – credit cards, banking and travel – and disparate markets where products were sold in 14 different languages across a variety of cultures.

How did Forum develop a standardized program that could be taught to so many different groups? “You have to understand what core skills are needed across all lines of business, like presenting, listening and negotiating,” Byrne says. “Then you have to teach them the same models of how to do it, but in their own venue and languages.”

Byrne says Forum customized the role playing and other exercises that were used in the curriculum and translated them into the languages of the participants and directed them to each type of business. For instance, executives who sought business in restaurants in Thailand or travel agencies in England learned the same basic skills, but they were customized to the types of business and taught in the languages of the Amex salespeople.

A variety of subjects were covered in the curriculum, including Relationship Management, Consultative Selling Skills, Negotiating for Profitability, Account Strategies, Presentation Skills and Customer-Focused Selling Skills. Byrne oversaw the group of consultants who designed the programs and worked with them over a two-year period to get it up and running around the world. The curriculum has helped Amex secure new contracts with 90 percent of its “at risk” accounts in one client group and enabled the company to reduce training costs by 40 percent, because the Forum program replaced more than 100 training programs Amex had used before that weren’t working well together.

Selling for a company that teaches sales has enabled Byrne to become an expert on the subject. She says the company recognizes five success factors that its own salespeople must master to sell Forum’s programs. In turn, Forum’s students should master the success factors in their own sales ventures, she says.

The first factor, “knowing realities,” demands developing a business acumen and effectively learning about your client’s business situation and your own products and services. Such a knowledge enables you to “balance customer needs and your own company’s requirements,” Byrne says.

The second factor, “seeing possibilities,” requires “unbounded thinking,” she explains. “Challenge yourself to examine the client’s business issues from different perspectives in order to create a profound understanding of the situation and potential solutions. Use intuition and have faith in your ideas.” The important point here is to bring original ideas to the table that will solve client problems in a new way.

The third factor, “engaging in dialogues,” concerns communication skills. It is important, Byrne says, to be able to “communicate your company’s capability to meet client needs.” Everyone knows good salespeople know how to communicate, but for Byrne communication must always be specifically tailored to “expressing business concepts and solutions in a manner that increases client confidence and advances relationships.”

The fourth factor, “managing details,” deals with organizational skills. Here it is essential “to coordinate project plans, processes and schedules and orchestrate resources to meet clients’ short- and long-term needs.” This is the skill that brings order to every account and makes it flow smoothly.

The fifth factor, “synthesizing solutions,” demands the ability to oversee your account and determine the best action to take. You must be able to “analyze the customer’s needs and consider the range of your capabilities to provide insight into their situation and motivate them to take action.”

If you can master Byrne’s five success factors, you will be on your way to better sales. If you need help mastering them, you can turn to Forum for a customized sales training program.

Byrne says that sales training today has progressed from the staid classes of yesteryear to dynamic programs that may be delivered by satellite and incorporate CD-ROMs and computer-based simulations as study aids, so students can work at home. Byrne says that many of the courses today teach the success factors she preaches. They also help salespeople manage time more effectively, determine which clients are most profitable and learn how to “move up the ladder” and call on the best people- the CEO instead of the CIO, CFO or information manager.

1997 is a good year to be in the training business, because companies are seeking to “get their salespeople on board the fast track and train them faster to get greater yield,” Byrne says. In the aftermath of reengineering, companies want to grow, so they are relying on training programs to help them move ahead.

“We’re in a great place to make a difference,” Byrne says, a remark that signals her happiness at Forum, a company that is playing a major role in training salespeople and helping them tackle the challenges of the marketplace.