Excellence doesn’t happen by chance

Sales Academy White PaperHow to create successful Sales Academies that deliver measurable

and sustainable change and massive ROI

Pre-meeting Behaviour Listening Presenting Selling

Improving the small things can make the di�erence between winning and losing or success and failure - in sport and business

) Managers are not involved in the training of their staff and therefore can’t ensure the training sticks

) No sales management training - this is needed more than the frontline as the majority of sales managers are the best performers made manager

) Managers are not good coaches and lack of coaching culture

) No sales training at all but the sales targets are increasing year on year

) A board that is demanding growth without any investment in the sales force

) Focus on revenue or other numbers to assess capability

) Recruitment handled by your sales managers

) Lots of data about the sales force that is not being used and makes no difference

) A lack of succession planning or career path for the sales staff

) Losing talent to competitors

If you can relate to some of these risks in your organisation then you should start to think about a new more structured approach to developing the revenue engine of your company.

Why install a Sales Academy?

Do you face some of the following risks in your organisation?

) Different departments buying training on their own with no co-ordination with other areas of the business and no business plan to ensure ROI

) Training development plans having no direct linkage to support organisational stategy

) Different suppliers selling similar courses

) Different courses using different language

) No common language from the top to bottom of the sales force

) The company is buying stand alone courses rather than a properly specified and defined solution for sales development

) Sales people not getting the training they actually need – just what the company thinks they need resulting in resentment and lack of willingness to change

) One course for all different types of sales roles

) No measurement of skills or only subjective measurement by the sales managers

What is a Sales Academy?

A Sales Academy can be an organisation’s goal or mission, an aspiration for a people-centric culture, an organisation’s vision even. As a function it is an internal infrastructure that measures, supports, develops and sustains the development of each function in the sales force. It ensures the best talent is attracted to and employed by the organisation and then develops them as sales professionals to become the best they can be in their current role, supporting and guiding them through their sales careers within the organisation. In short, it should drive and manage the employee lifecycle

The infrastructure needs to contain project management, design, objective measurement, L&D incorporating talent development initiatives, mentors, coaches, trainers and training managers, sales professionals and most importantly board level sponsorship.

Employee Life Cycle

Retail Trainer SkillsRecruitment

(New Employees)

ManagementSkills

Development

Field SalesB2B & B2C

CustomerServices

LicenceAccreditation

LeadershipExecutive SkillsDevelopment

Talent & Development

(Existing Employees)

Call Centres Telephone

Skills B2B & B2C

In the 1970’s and 1980’s people were trained for 6 months before they were permitted to go out to sell and there were regular refresher courses lasting up to 4-6 weeks. A stark contrast to a sales person in today’s fast paced world who is lucky to receive 2 days of training.

Companies recruit sales people based on their apparent success and experience as indicated on their CV, or they use non sales focused measures. There are no standard consistent qualifications for the sales industry so their CV is their “qualification” but they are never tested on actually being able to deliver tangible and sustainable results before they join the new organisation. On top of this many of the recruiters used to assess and interview the candidates have never been trained how to recruit and use gut instinct and cultural fit (rapport building skills) of the candidate as the strongest measure of success – they recruit the

people they like and who are like themselves. In this way they take on sales people for £30,000, £40,000, £50,000 base salary and expect them to be able to sell based on what the candidate has told the company they have achieved in the past and how well they get on with the recruiting manager.

Economies had 12 years of boom and growth until the middle of 2008. Companies had no real pain so they had no need to invest in their sales forces - the orders kept coming in. At the same time the number of professional sales people in the UK expanded very rapidly – there are now 1 million sales people in the UK – and they became very good at taking orders.

In middle of 2008 the order taking stopped and companies started to realise that they had to compete and that their sales forces had to start selling. However, they had not invested in

the right development or recruitment of their sales teams so revenues for many collapsed.

The research study Silent Edge conducted with Cranfield in late 2008 and 2009 showed that only 12 % of new business people, 4% of account managers and 2% of telesales people have the necessary skills to do their jobs properly. “Sales Force UK” is not good at selling.

Now budgets are squeezed at a time when companies need to invest in their sales forces. Buying a two day training course is not going to cut the mustard. You’re out of your mind if you think it will change the skill set and behaviour of anyone.

Companies are starting to realise they need to do something completely different as the world has changed and the old methods don’t work in these different times.

Why have so many not succeeded in increasing revenues and profit?

If you had Googled “competency frameworks” in 2002 (the birth of Silent Edge) then you would have got 7 hits – none to do with sales. In 2007 about 20% of blue chip companies were looking at measuring their sales teams using competency frameworks as well as numbers. Now in 2010 that figure is more like 70% and many have implemented them.

However the common mistake that has been made is the application and detail of competency frameworks. They all revolve around the manger subjectively assessing their staff in their opinion and the sales person self assessing and then comparing the results.

Every manager has their likes and dislikes. One manager may have high standards and another low, so there is no common benchmark to score from.

Put simply, subjective opinion provides inaccurate data and if you base development and HR decisions on inaccurate data you get negative results. There are countless companies and sales academies where, after considerable investment, there has been little or no sustainable change in the behaviour of the sales force or sales management.

In 2006 we asked 61 experienced sales trainers from a leading UK insurance company (who also went out and scored the sales staff for compliance) to score a 15 minute DVD of a poor sales pitch. They were given 25 competencies to score against and had to score each one from 1 -10 (ten being excellent).

The scores of all 61 ranged from 16% to 64% - a 4 fold difference and yet they all watched the

same DVD at the same time.

The measurement of competencies has to be objective to end up with accurate data on which companies can base sound decisions such as the ones in the diagram below.

The only way you can create objectivity is to define best practice and “what good looks like” for every role you need to measure.

At Silent Edge we have over 200 scorecards to choose from covering every type of pre sales, sales, account manager, telesales, call centre and sales management/leadership role in the world. Most are also tailored to different industries as well. They are all available in 7 European languages.

Subjectivity versus objectivity

“Silent Edge were brought in to

help transform the performance of

our sales force. In less than a year,

and despite the adverse economic

conditions, the programme has

delivered the strongest increase

in productivity and effectiveness

resulting in a 11% improvement

in revenues. They were able to get

sponsorship at the top and at all

levels throughout the sales force

increasing motivation, morale,

belief and confidence. Their

implementation was flawless under

tight timelines and pressure from

our business. Consequently we have

happily renewed our contract for

the forthcoming year with a view

to sustaining and embedding the

massive change we have already

created with the Silent Edge Sales

Academy”

David Benjamin (CEO)

BT Directories

Coaching without objective data

No focus on managers

Your sales managers are the pillars of your sales organisation. 83% got there because they were good at selling, not because they were good managers. Only 6% have had professional sales management skills training.

Many companies focus on training the front line sales staff and neglect the managers assuming they should know how to run the sales force. Often the managers do not attend the sales courses their own sales staff attend. So they do not understand the new language or techniques their teams return with and cannot support them.

If you have not focused on creating a coaching culture with your managers and given them development and skills to be excellent sales managers then your sales academy will fail.

BT Directories put out to tender a project to turn their 60 sales managers into world class coaches. We pointed out that although there are many good courses that they could send their managers on, when they returned to the office as great coaches, what would they actually coach their sales staff on?

Without a clear competency framework the managers would simply coach the sales staff in their own way of selling and would therefore cascade bad practice brilliantly throughout their organisation. It is essential that a manager can combine coaching skills with objective data on the competencies of their sales people

Fortunately BT Directories followed our advice and as a result had an increase in sales of 11% in the worst recessionary year we have seen for decades.

Dependence on training not coachingToo many Sales Academies depend on training the sales staff to improve their skills without looking to improve the sales management and coaching skills (two different things) of the entire sales management team – that includes the managers of managers and Sales Director.

If the managers have world class coaching skills then they will become the team that will sustain and ensure that the sales people are using the new skills they have been taught. Without this the new skills will dissipate very quickly and a few weeks later the sales staff will revert to their normal habits.

Developing a coaching culture is fundamental to the success of an academy. Your sales managers become the pillars of your academy and the platform for growth.

) Increasing revenue growth

) Delivering Return On Investment

) Delivering training exactly where it is needed ensuring the budget is spent precisely and accurately - training needs analysis

) Keeping the skills of the team in development mode – different levels means striving to get to the next stage

) Motivating sales people to learn and develop

) Reduce unwanted churn of sales people

) Providing a clear career path for sales and sales management roles

) Being able to measure talent and prove ROI on training

) Career progression

) Succession planning

) Managing out non-performers that do not improve their skills

) Creating strong sales management and leadership

) Creating a coaching culture

) Provide a happy and rewarding environment to work in

) Improve motivation, morale, belief and confidence

) Have customers recommend and praise the sales force/company to their peers and colleagues

) Have an internalised sustainable and scalable solution

) Link sales professionals skills improvement to incentives and the HR process

All of the above is achievable with a properly run Sales Academy. Yet even now most base their decisions and development on subjective data and simply incubate and propagate existing sales manager inefficiencies where the root cause of the problem lies.

Planning for Success - Driving Business Results

1 day Motivating Business Results

Goal Mapping

2 days Best Practice and Skills Tailored

Development Workshops

3 Days Critical Elements of Sales Management

Evaluation

SustainabilityLearning

Set 1

SustainabilityLearning

Set 2

SustainabilityLearning

Set 3

Feedback

1 day Developing Dynamic

Proposition Workshop

What should be the objective for a Sales Academy?

The Critical HourHere is a sobering thought; we can tell if someone can actually sell in an hour!

This is the hour that they spend with a prospective customer, an hour where the decision about whether your company has any chance of doing business with the prospect is decided. Although few potential customers decide to buy on a first meeting, most will decide not to buy.

This is why Silent Edge-trained sales force observers, either from within your company or provided by us, insist on attending at least two live sales calls in the case of field sales people, and listening in to multiple calls in the case of telesales people.

“Silent Edge had a highly beneficial

impact on the team in both tangible

sales results and a change in behaviour

to sell complete solutions. £2.5m of new

business has been directly attributed to

the skills acquired from the programme.

This has occurred in a time of considerable

change in the organisation and in a

highly challenging economic climate and

marketplace.”

Dave Everest (SALES DIRECTOR)

Calyx

Actual Ability vs PerceptionCritical Hour™ Competency Averages

Don’t change people and processes, change behaviourIf your aim is to develop your sales force, you need to win their hearts and minds.

Otherwise, they won’t change their behaviour, they won’t buy into the development programme and just days after training has ended they will revert to their previous behaviour. Silent Edge works on the principle that you cannot effect changes in performance by simply changing the process – you have to change the team’s behaviour.

Have you ever wondered why highly paid and highly rated sports teams can suddenly perform so badly? One of the biggest reasons for this is that most teams operate on a delicate knife edge between peak performance

and failure. The slightest change in team or individual behaviour can have a massive impact – positively as well as negatively. Changing behaviour is the key to changing performance.

Having given the team and individual detailed feedback on their assessments we help them through the process of changing their behaviour through detailed action plans, workshops and coaching. This starts with us guiding them through the “Change Curve” to a point where they accept their ability as it is right now. If a sales person does not accept the need to change, then they won’t and any training given thereafter will be a waste of time and money.

“I have used every training course

and well known brand in my career

but I have never seen anything like

Silent Edge. They transformed my

sales force taking their revenues from

£750k a month to £4m a month in 6

months. More remarkably the other

6 regions in CW did not increase their

revenues during this time.”

Mike Siddon (REGIONAL MD)

Cable & Wireless

Getting to Acceptance as

quickly as possible is of paramount

importance!

The Change Curve

Our aim is to take your sales force on a journey of self discovery. The journey is designed to support both the individual’s change on a personal level and the teams’ ability to grow through shared learning initiatives. At the end of this programme journey the Performance Coach will work with you to identify 3 things that will be done differently within your business as a result of the Programme. Those 3 things will be integrated into activities within your business to ensure sustained success.

Sales Force Development Journey

1 Evaluation2 Feedback

3 Plan to change

4 Create goals

5 Development

6 Coaching

7 Memory jogger

Think of this as a fitness test. Using data recorded from observations of live sales calls and meetings we are able to assess objectively the performance of each sales person in the team. The impact of these results provides strong motivation for changes in behaviour and subsequent improvement in performance.

1 Evaluation

Delivered by sales management and Silent Edge experts, this process enables individuals to start accepting the need to change sales behaviour. The feedback section, and how it is delivered, is a crucial part of the Sales Force Evaluation journey.

2 Feedback

Armed with the objective evaluation results, with our help, the sales person can now create a personal development plan. Here, they learn how to apply the tools which will help them to achieve their goals.

3 Plan to change

This is the process known as Goal Mapping. Using tried and tested techniques, incorporating words, images and symbols we show the sales person how to visualise their future success.

4 Create goals

Here we build skills workshops to provide targeted, accelerated development activities for specific roles. This is all about avoiding “sheep dip” training programmes and instead creating an intense climate of purpose and change.

5 Development

The best sports people in the world would never have achieved their goals without their coaches. The same is true in the business world and the Sales Force Evaluation journey raises expectations all round. Effective coaching ensures that expectations and improved performances are sustainable.

6 Coaching

This 3 – 4 minute video of the key learning points can be sent to the mobile devices of your sales team. The sales person can download them as an aide memoir before they start an important meeting.

7 Memory jogger

They say necessity is the mother of invention and in the case of Silent Edge this could not be more true. Russell Ward and Lorna Dakers were both highly successful and experienced international Sales Directors when they concluded that the sales training industry was failing to do its job properly. They were frustrated by what they call the “sheep dip” approach to training – everyone goes in one end, gets saturated and then comes out the other end, taking no account of the fact that sales teams are made up of individuals with different abilities and levels of sales skill.

They spent substantial sums with well known training providers only to find that after a couple of months nothing had really changed. Their teams reverted to ‘business as normal’ and the training budgets had been wasted.

So Silent Edge was born. From the start the business was passionate about creating sales training programmes that were based on objective assessment rather than opinion. The

pair built a team of sales professionals and skills development specialists to research, develop and test a new approach to measuring sales force performance in real live sales situations. The research clearly identified the skills and behaviour demonstrated by the most successful sales people. So Silent Edge developed the “Sales Force Evaluation”™ tool to measure sales skills, knowledge and behaviour and to bench mark them against best practice not only in the UK but across Europe and in local language.

This approach is one which sets Silent Edge apart from all other competitors. The tools and methodologies behind the evaluation process have won awards and have captured the interest and active support of two leading business schools, Ashridge Business School and Cranfield University School of Management. Silent Edge methodologies are also used as the measurement standard to find the country’s best performers in the UK Sales Industry Awards, National Sales Awards and BESMA.

“Silent Edge’s unique end-to-

end solution motivates sales

people to improve performance

and alters their behaviour to

sell real solutions. Our profit

increased 13% from £45m to

£51m in a market that was

trading backwards.Our growth

rate currently stands at 10%

compared to the rest of the

marketplace whose growth rate

is only 2%. We can attribute this

growth to the work undertaken

by Silent Edge.”

Andy Kemp (GROUP SALES DIRECTOR)

3663

About Silent Edge

Some of our clients:

Working with Cranfield University School of ManagementThere are not many sales performance consultancies that would even consider that their work was worthy of accreditation by one of Europe’s leading business schools - let alone expect to be directly approached on the strength of reputation. Silent Edge is now a valued research partner to CUSM.

Our relationship with Cranfield is one that we are justifiably proud of. They have been

“The competencies Silent Edge have

defined to benchmark sales people

really help drive sales performance.

The model can also predict how likely

a sales person is to close a deal.”

Professor Lynette Ryals Cranfield University School of

Management

working with our data for over two years now and, with them, we have produced some ground breaking findings. Included in this is the revelation that there are 8 types of sales people and you will be able to identify what type of people you have in your company in terms of skills, levels and roles. Once armed with this powerful information you will be in the perfect place to help them develop and improve their performance…significantly.

Product Focused

Narrators

Deal Makers

Socialisers

Story Tellers ConsultantsProduct Closers

Experts

Product Service

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Cl

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“The programme is the best I have been on by the way, way better than Vodafone and better than companies like Unilever, Coca Cola Enterprises and Whitbread, all of which I was a first line manager”.

John Hough (BUSINESS MANAGER) Orange

“I have been to numerous workshops, seminars, courses etc over the last 10 years and this was without doubt the best course I have been on…truly inspiring! I am looking forward to putting what I have learnt into practice”.

Anthony Keen(BRANCH TRAINER) BT Customer Street

“Silent Edge transformed my sales force, taking them from £750k a month to £4m a month in six months … In six weeks we achieved what could normally take four months. The precision of the evaluation data enabled us to make immediate decisions on the development plan for each of our salespeople. ”

Mike Siddon(REGIONAL MD) Cable & Wireless

“It has picked up some areas that unless I had seen the Silent Edge report I would have carried on making the same mistakes for the rest of my career. I have been selling for 30 years so you can teach an old dog new tricks!”

Liam Casserly(DEVELOPMENT UNDERWRITER) Ecclesiastical Insurance Group

“I would sum up my experience with Silent Edge as being like strawberries and cream at Wimbledon on a summer’s day, you don’t realise just how good it is till you have it. Thank you.”

Glyn BlaizeAdrem

“I am sitting in a position I never dreamed I would be in 12 months ago all thanks to Silent Edge. We have increased revenues by 50% overall and the minimum product line had 40% growth in a market that has had modest single digit growth at best. Our margins have improved, the competition are shocked and hurting, the team are highly motivated and are far more professional in their approach. We are now working with Silent Edge on phase two of their development programme.”

John O’Brien(MANAGING DIRECTOR) Sematron UK

Silent Edge Ltd Union HouseEridge Road

Tunbridge WellsEnglandTN4 8HF

Tel: +44(0)1892 502200www.silentedge.co.uk