Did you know that investing in professional skills development could give you an edge over your competitors, with a boost of 57% in sales effectiveness? Yet, despite this fact, many companies still struggle to provide their global workforce with the right sales development and resources. Enter the Sales Academy, the solution to bridging this gap.
Whether you’re looking to drive commercial growth, expand into new markets, launch new products or services, or adapt to market changes, a Sales Academy can help you achieve your business goals.
With a focus on professional sales skills and comprehensive training, a Sales Academy provides a sustainable, flexible, and consistent way to develop your sales team’s competencies. Utilising a mix of remote and instructor-led training, along with best practices and coaching, it offers a scalable way to build sales skills targeted at specific departments, divisions, or individuals within your organisation.
For both commercial growth and career advancement, sales professionals must continuously improve their skills. A Sales Academy provides a way to reach your global teams and equip them with 360-degree sales development in a shorter time frame, maximising your sales team’s learning opportunities and driving success.
Here are 5 reasons why you should consider developing a Sales Academy for your sales team:
- Develop a positive sales culture – Developing a consistent way of selling across the organisation will drive meaningful customer growth and unlock predictable sales results.A positive sales culture is particularly important to optimise your sales teams and get them working well together. Creating a shared language and common understanding improves collaboration and employee mobility between divisions and departments. It can also be particularly beneficial in an acquisition setting where you are bringing different teams together.
- Upskill your sales teams – Having sales personnel scattered all around the world can make it difficult to quickly educate them on new selling techniques or how to present a new product. Since most salespeople are often out in the field visiting customers, it can be difficult to track them down. Studies show that 84% of sales training is forgotten within 3 months (Spotio, 2022). To ensure fast and lasting knowledge absorption, a sales academy with distributed learning and reinforcement is an effective way to ensure the success of your sales team.
- Enable sales professionals to self-learn on the go – Your sales professionals will require selective and specific support as they go about their job. Prior to entering a difficult negotiation, it is vital to have access to resources to equip oneself with the necessary knowledge of negotiating or selling strategies. Providing mobile access to such resources is beneficial to sales teams as it allows them to learn exactly when they need to, making the training more applicable.
- Provide consistent, flexible learning worldwide – One-size-fits-all learning and development rarely meets the needs of all learners in a large global organisation. Adaptation needs to be made both linguistically and culturally so that your learning programmes are accepted by learners as relevant and fit for purpose.A successful sales academy acts as a global platform that brings your sales population together, as a co-ordinated, global salesforce. But, built into it should be the flexibility of offering specific, tailored content and learning to your different sets of employees, teams and business wherever they are.
- Create better value for money – The benefits of a sales academy can often be seen financially, through the consolidation of all the learning and training needs and any external partners into one internal sales university.All the resources, digital learning tools and materials from instructor-led classroom training are made available to whoever needs them, whenever they need them right across the organisation. You benefit from economies of scale whilst reducing the silo effect, noise and distraction of the many different learning initiatives often targeting sales professionals.
Transform your business performance and optimise learning opportunities
If you’re thinking about what pathway you need to take towards creating a successful sales academy, we can help. Through our expertise and experience we’ve helped many of our clients globally to create successful academies, adapting and scaling resources to help their sales professionals maintain a competitive advantage. Speak with a Tack TMI Sales expert today.
