Our sales training portfolio covers a range of topics including:

• Foundation Sales
• Professional Sales for experienced salespeople
• Sales skills for non-sales staff (typically engineers and technicians)
• Account Management sales
• Presentation and pitching skills
• Negotiation, communication, influencing and persuasion skills
• Sales Management and Sales leadership
• Sales skills for front line customer service staff.

The underlying principles behind our sales training courses are:

• Selling is a natural extension of servicing your client’s business; you are either solving their problems or inventing their future
• Professional selling is not tricking people into buying something they don't need
• Every company has a unique sales approach and culture, which is critical to the success of the business
• This unique approach should be determined by the sales strategy and closely aligned with the marketing strategy.

Our courses emphasise the professional, people-to-people elements of sales: prospecting intelligently, qualifying opportunities, pipeline management, building (and maintaining) relationships, advanced communication skills and understanding the importance of account development.

Most importantly, all our courses and workshops look at selling from the buyers’ viewpoint.

We consciously expose the myths of old ‘hard nose’ style selling techniques (e.g. ‘closing’) and highlight the barriers that these can cause to building sustainable customer relationships.

Our courses and workshops cover (where appropriate) key concepts from the current leading sales theories e.g. Strategic Selling, Solution Selling, Power Base Selling, Challenger etc.

See Reference

Our Management and Leadership Development training portfolio includes:

• Essential Management skills for first line managers
• Personal productivity and effectiveness (Time Management)
• Communication, influencing and persuasion skills
• Negotiation skills
• Presentation skills
• Customer service management
• Team building.

Our Management Development workshops are underpinned by the following principles:

Agreed tangible business outcomes

It is important that the training experience produces tangible business results. To achieve this it must impact behaviours in the critical areas of the business. We ensure that key outcomes and required behavioural change is agreed with senior managers and key stakeholders. These will differ for each training intervention. For example:

• To empower participants with the essential tools of first line management
• To enable participants with effective problem solving skills and techniques
• To develop managers into inspirational leaders
• To improve productivity and personal effectiveness.

Senior Management support and participation

It is critical that senior management endorse the training principles that are being taught.

They must be in agreement with the overall objectives and target outcomes and be prepared to support and encourage the behavioural change that will result from the programme.

In addition we welcome their contributions to the workshop (e.g. a session on the Marketing strategy delivered by the Marketing Director).

Action Learning based

Where possible, our workshops utilise the principles of Action Learning where small groups of colleagues meet to tackle real problems or issues in order to effect change.

This is an approach that combines learning and solving real problems. It involves open discussion and analysis, agreeing an action plan, taking action and reflecting upon the results. Not only does it improve learning but it also improves the problem-solving process and delivers tangible team based solutions.

See Reference

Our Negotiation and Communication training portfolio includes:

• Negotiation skills
• Communication, influencing and persuasion skills
• Presentation skills.

Negotiation and Communication skills are essential to the success of an organisation regardless of its size.

Negotiations take place continuously. These may be as simple as arranging a meeting location, or they could be critical to the overall business success, such as clarifying the details of a recurring contract. Business people need to be familiar with negotiation tactics and understand how to effectively communicate during the negotiation process.

Likewise, our skills at day-to-day communication and influence dictate our effectiveness and success in business. But do we learn the principles of effective communication by accident? Effective communication takes conscious effort and practice and it is the defining characteristic of those who can influence behaviours and who achieve long-term success in business and personal relationships.

See Reference

It is well recognised nowadays that every organisation must deliver excellent customer service and the benefits are clear and well documented. These include:

• Customer loyalty
• Better employee morale
• Reduced cost
• Greater sales
• Better brand reputation

The bad news is that nearly all your competitors know this.

Good old fashioned ‘customer service’ is no longer good enough. To differentiate from your competitors you must go beyond the norm. This may mean delivering service that your customers will remember without significantly increasing your cost base (a challenge) or it may mean having difficult conversations with your customers to improve their business or ‘invent their future’.

This is where excellent customer service becomes good account management leading to increased sales.