Feb. 10, 2003-- Richardson, a leading sales training and consulting firm, today announced that they have been selected by Kinko's to provide a comprehensive and customized blended selling, service, and customer care training curriculum. Targeted to over 2,000 of Kinko's field salesforce, branch managers, and area managers, this sales training solution blends customized seminars and Richardson's four-star rated Web-based eLearning, Richardson QuickSkills. The goals of this training solution are to build skills, strengthen long-term relationships, reduce turnover, and increase business results. The blended seminar and eLearning curriculum includes: * Consultative Selling * Six Critical Skills * Customer Service * Sales Presentations * Coaching * A customized eLearning curriculum for branch managers and their team members "Selling skills are an instrumental part of our training strategy," says Mike Lassek, Senior Manager, Sales Training at Kinko's. "Richardson has really helped us equip our commercial sales force with the selling skills they need to be successful. And Richardson QuickSkills has made our strategy easy to implement across a national, highly mobile team." The Richardson sales curriculum is a part of Kinko's new Knowledge Network. Kinko's Knowledge Network provides a complete learning infrastructure and coordination process that improves the overall time to market of learning courses and programs. It combines a wide range of both eLearning and instructor-led training for close to 20,000 Kinko's team members. "The Kinko's Knowledge Network creates an anytime-anywhere learning environment that supports field education needs. It merges the best of eLearning, instructor-led, and hands-on education to promote professional development, increase retention, drive revenue, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction," says Whitney Shelley, Director of Learning and Development at Kinko's. "It allows us to offer a series of certification paths that align with core competencies, company goals, and performance management to enable professionals to drive their own development. "Kinko's is a world-class, customer-focused organization," says Linda Richardson, President and CEO of Richardson. "It is a great pleasure to be able to work closely with Kinko's to build a sales and customer service curriculum to support their field team members in reaching their next level of sales and service excellence. We are thrilled to be a part of Kinko's new Knowledge Network and to be included in such a visionary design, implementation, and delivery of learning."