ASTD Honors Amway Global and AllenComm with its Excellence in Practice Award

SALT LAKE CITY (March 1, 2010) — At the upcoming 2010 International Conference & Exposition in May in Chicago, IL, the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) will present the Excellence in Practice Award to Amway Global and Allen Communication Learning Services (Allen). ASTD has chosen to award these two companies based on the results achieved from the first set of sales training courses.

The Excellence in Practice Awards program recognizes organizations for results achieved through learning and performance practices and solutions. This year, ASTD received 131 entries; 21 practices were selected to receive awards, and 38 were chosen for citations.

“ASTD’s recognition of the important role training played in increasing sales and performance for Amway’s independent business owners shows the dedication Amway has to their members,” states Ron Zamir, CEO of Allen Communication Learning Services. “In a year when many companies cut back on training expenses, Amway and others lead the way to driving business growth and the economy’s growth. AllenComm is happy for our customer’s success and for the dedication of our instructional designers and developers who create such impactful training.”

The data Amway and AllenComm submitted was based on a set of courses to build basic selling skills and just-in-time product knowledge for new independent business owners (IBOs). In less than a year since launch, the average monthly revenue from established IBOs who took the web based training increased 52% from the previous year. The revenue for the IBOs attending the instructor led training was 107% higher than that of others in the same geographical area. This represented a 19% increase in monthly revenue over their sales the previous year.

“The effectiveness of this sales training stems from the collaboration between a group of independent distributors, Amway Global, and AllenComm,” states Char Griffin, Manager of Instructional Design for Amway Global. “In many organizations, the separation between an independent sales force and the corporation is difficult to bridge; and too often, vendors don’t invest the time it takes to really understand their clients’ reality. ASTD’s citation is a tribute to all the people who worked hard to build the bridges that made this project so successful.”

Amway Global and AllenComm are in the process of rolling out a curriculum of advanced selling courses to follow up on the success of their introductory courses as well as the high demand from their IBOs. In addition, Amway Global is translating the entire selling curriculum into four languages—Korean, French, Spanish, and Chinese— to meet the needs of their diverse IBO population within the US and Canada.

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About Amway

Based in Ada, Mich., Amway is part of the Alticor group of companies, founded by the DeVos and Van Andel families. Alticor is the parent company of Amway, Access Business Group and Alticor Corporate Enterprises. The company offers consumer products and business opportunities, as well as product development, manufacturing and logistics services in more than 80 countries and territories worldwide. The company reported annual sales of $8.4 billion for the year ending December 31, 2009.

About AllenComm

For three decades, the learning and development experts at Allen Communication Learning Services () have helped many of the world’s largest companies sharpen their organizational performance. AllenComm expands their client’s capabilities by using progressive approaches in custom training, e-learning, and blended learning development, as well as learning portal development and technologies. This bold approach results in highly-customized organizational training solutions that help departments scale and achieve more, while improving ROI.