Mumbai, Dec 20: Motorola Authorised Training Academy (MATA), Motorola's effort to provide value-addition to customers, will be opened in January 1998. The project set up in association with Team Productivity, will train nearly 2,500 strong sales force in addition to 1200 paging dealers.

Marketing head of Motorola Paging Ajay Sachdeva told The Financial Express that the training module, consisting of two capsules, is ready. "The idea is to equip the salesperson with selling and objection handling techniques to address customers' total requirements," he said. Motorola has so far made an investment of Rs 3 million in the project.

Talking about the uniqueness of the academy, Sachdeva said content of the training programme will undergo changes as per the requirement. A third capsule on retailer pager selling training is being developed for needs on the retail side. "It will be a continuous process, having a lot of flexibility."

The academy will provide sales team information on latest developments in paging and general outlook of the industry. A round-the-clock help line will be available to salespersons for clearing doubts on paging.

"Depending on the success of the venture, we will start similar projects in a number of cities in the country," Sachdeva said.

On the latest trend, Sachdeva said the use of regional language pagers are catching up. "It is now the value addition that matters and this is one of our major ventures towards that goal," he said.Motorola has a dominating presence in the paging business in India. In 1995, Motorola sold almost 1,25, 000 pagers in India when paging started catching attention. By 1996, it was able to sell nearly 3,10,000 pagers and in 1997, it has sold 4,00,000 to lead the market.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.