BT Local Business – Cambridgeshire

BT Local Business, Cambridgeshire serves BT Group’s small and medium  businesses in the area covering Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire.

Its customers range from small single-line businesses to large, complex multi-site organisations such as Further Education Colleges. Comprising a large desk team sales operation was already one of the highest performers in the UK league table of BT Local Businesses. However, its directors demanded more.

As Managing Director Jamie Eborall put it: “I felt there was more we could get out of the team in terms of performance. And there were a couple of product areas where we were do-ing badly - the team lack confidence when it came to these products.”.

WHY SALES-MIND?

The company met sales-mind following the completion of their programme at another BT Local Business. After two presentations, the management team chose to push ahead with the sales-mind programme. Having, “tried everything else” in the form of traditional sales training - mostly skills and technique-based - they were attracted by the programme’s focus on mindset.

THE PROGRAMME

Following two days of “discovery” in which the sales-mind team conducted structured interviews with the team, attended sales visits and listened to outbound calls, the sales training programme was designed drawing on sales-mind's five-point conceptual model for the selling mindset: Focus; Resilience; Motivation; Empathy; and Mindfulness.

Download our BT sales training case study.

Particular emphasis was given to the first three concepts which featured in the programme’s mix of interactive workshops and one-to-one coaching. From the kick-off two-day workshop, the delegates realised that this was not “sales training” as they had come to know it - gone were the PowerPoint decks and ring-binders; instead, they experienced a high-energy series of interactive sessions that put the responsibility for learning and performance on their own shoulders.

CONFIDENCE

Particular emphasis was put on the “problem children” products over which the team had developed some sort of mental block. Drawing on the proven scientific techniques developed by psychologists to help sales people deal with adversity and improve their levels of confidence, sales-mind taught the team tools that enabled them to optimise their selling mindset.

TEAM VALUES

While the BT Local Business already had a set of corporate values, which had been put together by the management, these were not alive in the business day-to-day. salesmind kicked off the process of a bottom-up set of values again drawing on exercises developed by business psychologists. The result was a set of values owned , created and enforced by the team itself. In the language of psychologists, this has created a new set of social norms at the business enhancing the team’s collective motivation, sense of work ethic and responsibility to one another.

THE OUTCOMES

In the three months following the beginning of the sales-mind programme, there was an immediate uplift in sales performance. With the programme’s two-day kick-off workshop taking place at the beginning of September, the gross margin achievement for the following three month period was eight percent higher than the preceding three months.

For the two “problem products”, an immediate uplift was evident in September and in the months thereafter. The most challenging product experienced, from a low base, a 300% uplift in volume sales in the three months from the initial workshop compared with the prior three months. Over the same period, the second product experienced a 28% uplift in revenue terms.

For further information on how a sales-mind programme could help your organisation please email: info@sales-mind.com or call +44 (0)1727 220747