Investing in Employee Education at Sweetwater: Jeff Radke Discusses How Sweetwater University is a Cornerstone of the ‘Sweetwater Difference’

Initially formed nearly 25 years ago, Sweetwater University has evolved from a small group study session into an immersive, 13-week training initiative where employees receive in-depth education on all aspects of how to be true “Sales Engineers.” Chief Sales Officer at Sweetwater, Jeff Radke recently chatted with MMR about how the innovative program strives to provide the tools and knowledge necessary to best serve customers and position the individual Sweetwater team members to achieve success, themselves.

Can you talk about the catalyst for the launching of Sweetwater University back in the ‘90s? What prompted that initiative? 

We’ve always had a very technically savvy team and they were doing a lot on their own to build their level of product knowledge and keep up with technology. For all intents and purposes, Sweetwater University started with groups of sales engineers who were simply meeting after work to learn about new products and share their knowledge and experience with each other. When we hired new sales engineers, we found that they needed to intern for a year or so with an experienced sales engineer to become comfortable working directly with customers themselves. As we grew, it became obvious that this wasn’t scalable. More importantly, this wasn’t an ideal way to ensure that each new sales engineer knew everything they needed to know because so much depended on the one person they were working with. By developing a more structured holistic program that included not just gear training, but sales, communication, organizational skills, etc., we’ve been able to ensure that each customer receives a consistently high level of service. One cool fact is that the same person has been the manager of sales training (I call him the dean of Sweetwater University) since its inception!

While most people understand how crucial it is to have well-informed sales personnel in a music retail store, what about Sweetwater’s approach within the 13-week training program targets skill sets of most value to the staffer, the customer, and the business model? What specific areas of knowledge and communication are targeted within the training program? 

It really is an all-encompassing training model. One of the critical differences at Sweetwater is that we want each sales engineer to be in the mindset of running their own business or “store,” so they aren’t just doing a job. Furthermore, being a sales engineer is a career, not a day gig or stepping-stone position. The very first sales engineer that founder of Sweetwater, Chuck Surack hired is still taking care of some customers he’s worked with for over 34 years! I want each sales engineer to have an owner mentality in all they do.

In terms of specific areas of knowledge, there are a few core elements to Sweetwater University. First, there is the technical. We view this as a kind of graduate degree that covers literally every single product category we carry, with tech exams that must be passed before a sales engineer can graduate from Sweetwater University. Then, there is the sales and communication training. For us, sales = problem solving and communication. The ability to discuss extremely complex system designs and articulate nuances of feel and sound is incredibly important. Ideally, we will speak to a customer on the phone to help them with their purchase; it’s just much more efficient than any other form of communication. We do a lot of role-playing to work through customer situations and give the sales engineers a high degree of comfort in addressing whatever kind of call comes in. However, sales engineers also must be able to communicate well via email and text. Finally, we also have classes on personal finance, goal setting, and exercising cultural and emotional intelligence in all communication.

Much has changed since the ‘90s. How is Sweetwater’s employee education program different in 2023 from back when it was launched all those years ago? Has Sweetwater leveraged emerging tech to advance the program throughout the years? 

Sweetwater University has changed a lot as we’ve learned and evolved. Back when it started, the internet was still in its infancy in terms of retail. Customer expectations and the way they prefer to communicate have all changed dramatically… texting wasn’t a thing back then! Obviously, the gear has changed in a truly revolutionary way.

We are still kind of old school with training in that we prefer to have a live person in front of the group who is a great presenter and can adjust to each specific group and interact with them based on their needs. We film every one of those training sessions and stream them on our internet so that people in various departments of the company can tune in if they’d like. Our onsite physician is even known to watch the product trainings on a regular basis! The love of music and knowledge of gear really does extend to every corner of the building.

We have an expert team of in-house developers to help us create tech that is unique to use in how we train. Other technologies include things like Microsoft Office 365 which allows us to share information with students (OneDrive for example) and communicate with them in ways that were previously unavailable. We also include some eLearning outside of the classroom for deeper dives with specific vendors/tech. We have also done a lot of work on the Confluence platform in the past few years, which is a collaborative workspace we use to host and organize all our training manuals among other things. People are floored when they see how complete and up-to-date our documentation of policies and procedures are.

I’d imagine that employees who enter Sweetwater University do so with wildly varying degrees of pre-existing knowledge and skills. How does the program adjust and cater to the individual strengths and weaknesses of employees? 

We work really hard to find employees who have existing broad and relatively deep knowledge of music gear. That being noted, we’ve never hired somebody who knew everything about everything so we are always working on ways to quickly elevate them past the 101 stage so they can keep up with the rest of the class. One thing we look for during the interview process is the aptitude and hunger to learn. Within the first few days a class starts, they already know who they can turn to within the class for questions on areas they aren’t strong in, and they also know they will be surrounded by incredible resources who will help them learn and get the answers they are seeking. Prior sales experience is great, but we really do build this from the ground up for every new hire to ensure they are maintaining the standard we’ve developed over the years.

More importantly, learning doesn’t stop when they graduate from Sweetwater University. We have three hours of training every week in addition to vendors coming in for Office Hours (think of this as a mini-trade show), doing lunch and learns, certification training and more. We also have a Sales Resource Center where sales engineers can check gear out to use in their studios or on gigs. We work in a toy store; we need to play with the toys!

Are there any recent or upcoming developments within Sweetwater University and within Sweetwater’s commitment to employee education that you’d like to share with our readers? 

I’ve recently created the position of “director of training,” who has the responsibility for every aspect of technical and professional training for the sales team. This goes beyond Sweetwater University and will allow us to better coordinate all training for my team. I’m super excited about further elevating the training for our department and consider it one of the key differentiators that will drive our future success. One big initiative that we’re currently working on is what I’ll call “continuing education,” which is the development of multi-level training modules that will allow self-paced deeper dives in specific product categories or even 101 training for other employees.