Building a Service Culture

Effective customer service can be affected by training and processes, but more than anything, it's a cultural issue. Learn how to embed a culture of service excellence in your organisation

Complaint Handling

Complaints are too often treated as a problem, or simply ignored. Learn how to leverage the power of a complaint to gain improvement for your business, and increased loyalty from the complaining customer

Customer Care

This module looks at what we do with customers after the sale, customer care. We look at the business benefits of good customer care, and the risks associated with overlooking it. We examine what a service culture would mean in an organisation, and looks at practical, straightforward approaches to creating a simple service strategy, and handling complaints.

Dealing With Angry Customer

Difficult, angry customers can be a real challenge for any customer service centre, causing stress, and being hard to bring to a resolution. Learn a simple process for defusing anger, calming the customer, and getting their issues back on track.

Net Promoter Score

NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three categories. "Promoters" are loyal enthusiasts who keep buying from a company and urge their friends to do the same. "Passives" are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who can be easily wooed by the competition. And "detractors" are unhappy customers trapped in a bad relationship. Customers can be categorized based on their answer to the ultimate question 'how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend?. This workshops looks at how the net promoter score tool can help you identify if your company is delighting your customer base, leading to long-term profitable growth.

Call Planner

This call planner will help you detail the things that you need to think about prior to your sales meeting.

Basic Discipline

To give anyone potentially involved in implementing discipline an understanding of what is involved and the process and procedure to follow. The module is aimed at Managers who are not HR professionals, giving them are structure to follow. However, the advice would be to always seek professional advice where available.

Coaching and Effective Feedback

How to coach your team to improve them and their results and how to give constructive and effective feedback

Induction for New Starters

New salespeople will need to familiarise themselves with your business - its products, its employees and its customers. An induction process for new sales staff must cover, your company, your customers, your products and vitally the sales process. This practical workshop works through all these areas to ensure you put in place a robust and useful induction that will allow new staff to get up to speed quickly.

Interviewing

How to structure and hold effective interviews to be able to hire the sales people that your business needs. The module provides an outline structure, the dos and don'ts of interviewing and a number of sample competency questions for you to tailor to your own business situation.

Joint Sales Visits

To embed new sales skills and improve sales outcomes sales staff need to reflect on and analyse their performance, sales managers need to understand their role on joint visits including observation, intervention and feedback.

Motivating Sales People

If you are a Sales Manager then a key part of your management skills should be the knowledge of how to motivate your team. This module highlights the fact that sales people have different motivations and that a "one fits all" approach will not be the most effective.

Recruiting Sales People

The process of recruiting sales people with the right skills and experience to match the role

Remuneration and Reward

Remuneration of sales teams is not a one size fits all. Differing roles mean differing renumeration packages are appropriate. However there are some clear best practices that if done right can have a significant impact on sales results. This is a must course for all sales managers.

Sales Meetings

How to structure and deliver sales meetings that have an impact. Sales meetings are vital for the sales team to share learning and develop capabilities. Many of the workshops here in the sales development zone can be delivered effectively in a weekly sales meeting, facilitating learning and continual development.

Training 1 - Role of the Trainer and the Learning Process

Understand why organisations train, how training can meet the needs of the business, the qualities of a successful trainer, the different styles and types of learning and how to match your training to them

Training 2 - Delivery and Evaluation

How to understand the structure of groups, how to anticipate and overcome trainee problems and handle difficult trainees. Effective delivery of training sessions. Effectively measuring learning outcomes Short and long term measurement

Becoming a Great Sales Person

This courses presents a structure for developing yourself into a great sales person. It looks at how you can develop a personal sales strategy, an operational/territory plan, how you can manage your time effectively and what you need to be thinking about in terms of sales skills.

Buyer Motivation

This course looks at why organisations make the decision to buy. Through understanding why organisations are motivated to change their current practise you are better able to ascertain why and when they will move to buy from you.

Buying Decision Making Unit

For any sales person dealing with major or key accounts, this module enables you to understand who is involved in the buying decision, what their key influencers are and how you should structure your development plans. This should be taken in conjunction with the other modules within Key Account Management

Closing Skills

Sales people often take the sales process to the point where the customer is willing to buy but lack the closing techniques to get the order. Learn different types of closing techniques and how to use them.

Cold Calling

This course covers the basics of how to structure a cold call and build an effective script to make appointments for a sales visit. It helps you ensure that you instill the right disciplines and process to maximise the success rate you experience.

Commercial Awareness

Gives you an understanding of key commercial skills to be able to sell effectively - pricing, margins, cost of sales, cashflow, break-even points etc. The objective is to ensure that all of the sales team have the same level of knowledge as a minimum and speak the same commercial language.

Communication Skills

This module focuses on the importance of communication in the sales process, and how to do it effectively. Examining listening, style of speech, choice of language, and non verbal communication, we look at simple ways of improving communication, and increasing success. PowerPoint

Creating Value

This course looks at creating client value through understanding the buyers purchasing journey. This type of selling is ideal for those working in competitive complex sales environments where the sales person needs to help the client identify the problem, create a bespoke solution and ensure implementation runs smoothly.

Dealing with Difficult People

This workshop is an introduction in how to deal with difficult people to create positive outcomes. It contains the practical techniques you need to adopt to manage real-life situations.

Features, Advantages and Benefits

In this module, we look at the difference between features, advantages and benefits, and how each is used in the sales process. We examine the buyer's response to each of these, and use set examples of dialogue to illustrate how discussion in sales meetings can differ depending on which is used. We finish by mapping participants company products into a matrix, and establishing their benefits in specific customer situations.

Listening Skills

This module examines the importance of listening, and the skills needed to do it effectively. It looks at the statistically increasing importance of listening as responsibility increases, discusses non verbal cues which encourage people to keep talking, and advances models and tools for listening more effectively.

Objection Handling

This course covers the skills needed to overcome and deal with objections. It covers the different types of objection you might come up against and gives some practical suggestions as to how to deal with them.

Order, Advance, Continuation - Successful Selling

In this module, we look at how to measure the success of a sales call. Introducing concepts including Order, Advance or Continuation, we examine what can and cannot be considered success, and also the effect of too many attempts at closing. Focusing on developing needs, and persuasion techniques, we examine what to do with a sale which has stalled.

Organisation and Time Management

In this module, we look at organisation and time management. We unpack the importance of managing limited time, and examine ways to prioritise and plan tasks, as well as breaking major projects into chunks which can be tackled in a more manageable way. We also look at effective ways of avoiding project problems and time consuming rework.

Pipeline Creation

This course looks at effective business development activities that will allow you to build your pipeline. It maps out an effective process covering writing prospecting letters and emails, developing a script to follow up with a telephone call and detailing likely objections. It lays out the importance of setting aside specific prospecting time (at least 20% of your time)to ensure a consistent sales pipeline.

Qualifying a Sale

Using the SCOTSMAN mnemonic this course gives you a structure and discipline to fully qualify each of your sales opportunities. It goes through the 9 qualification criteria that you should be able to complete for each lead to ensure that the progression is both worthwhile and likely to ultimately lead to a close.

Questioning Skills

This module deals with how to question effectively, in order to get to move the client closer to a decision. We employ the 4R's model, Reality, Reasons for Change, Repercussions of Inaction, Return on Investment, to guide the client through the process, using open and closed questions at each stage to gain a better understanding of the situation, and then to focus on specific needs.

Rapport Building

People buy from people they trust, and building rapport with a client is critical to a long term buying relationship. Learn how to put clients at their ease, and gain their interest and trust to shorten the sales cycle and lay the foundations for repeat business.

Sales Planning

This course looks at how to plan your sales time, from a territory management point of view. It covers, identifying your target customers, mapping the sales activities needed at suspect, prospect and sales lead stage, sales cycles and sales conversion rates.

Sales Planning and Preparation

This course looks at how to plan your sales time, from a territory management point of view. It covers, identifying your target customers, mapping the sales activities needed at suspect, prospect and sales lead stage, sales cycles and sales conversion rates.

Sales Presentations

Once the salesperson is out of the room, the only thing convincing a buyer is the quality of the proposal and presentations he's left. Learn how to make yours punchy, effective and engaging.

Sales Prospecting

This training covers the basics of prospecting, looking at how you would create an effective focused list of prospects, and how you would determine the best way to reach them.

Setting Meeting Agendas

In a world where we are time-poor being productive with our time and our prospects is critical if we are to be seen as business professionals and a potential business partner. This course looks at the different types of agendas that may be appropriate throughout the sales process to help you maximise the efficient use of your selling time.

Solution Selling

Selling Solutions is a pragmatic approach for selling larger products and services. It helps transform the sales process into distinct steps which allows you to help position your products or services in relation to buyer needs; adds more value to the customer experience; achieves shorter sales cycles through better management of the buying process; and when the sale is completed forms a good bedrock for a long term relationship.

Telephone Based Selling

This module is a thorough and in-depth look at tele-sales. It casts telesales within the range of possible sales approaches, and introduces the concept of sales as a process. Using the Suspect, Prospect, Sales Lead methodology, this process is then applied specifically to telephone selling, and supported with specific telephone techniques, regarding getting past gatekeepers, dealing with callbacks and messages etc.

Telephone Skills

In this module, we look at the effective use of the telephone in the sales environment. Focussing on planning and timing calls, attitude, use of language, and listening skills, we cover everything needed to make the telephone a successful means of communication for both sales and customer service.

Trust Building

In this module, we look at why trust is such a valuable commodity in the sales process, and how its lack can damage the sales effort. We introduce simple steps to building trust with a new customer, and a handy tool to assess where you stand at present. We also assess what can happen when trust breaks down, and how to tackle the situation.

Trusted Advisor Status

It is essential that Key Account Managers know how to Develop and grow meaningful customer relationships and as a result differentiate themselves so that customers view them as a trusted advisor rather than a vendor.

Writing Proposals

This module looks at proposals, focusing on their purpose, and how to structure them to best effect. The difference between formal tenders and informal proposals is explored, a structure for informal proposals is provided, and some simple, practical rules for making proposals punchy, engaging and effective.