Training program boosts sales performance

Article Type: Notes and news From: Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 43, Issue 2

The potential for high-quality sales training to improve staff’s ability to generate new business is highlighted in a study published by UK specialist insurance company Ecclesiastical.

Based on information from the first year of its sales academy for staff, the results show that participants in Gloucester-based Ecclesiastical’s new training program increased the amount of new business they brought into the company by 13 percent. Participants were also significantly more comfortable selling the company’s products to insurance brokers.

The information, obtained by sales-performance specialist Silent Edge, which worked with Ecclesiastical on the project, shows that every £1 spent on training its business-development managers and regional sales managers generated a return of £9.39 in new business and £55.69 in gross written insurance premium.

Ecclesiastical attributed the results to the structure of its sales-academy program, the quality of its learning resources and the type of coaching used.

Juliette Daye, Ecclesiastical’s learning and development manager, said:

The academy was born out of desire to make a real, measurable difference to the way our people approach selling. Ecclesiastical is by no means among the most overtly commercial insurance companies in the UK – we are in fact owned by a charity – but the company has to generate new business to flourish and that responsibility falls to our business-development managers and regional sales managers. We wanted to offer these key people in our business a structured development program and arm them with everything they needed to feel as confident and motivated in their roles as possible.

The academy was our answer; a program designed to develop our talent and embed a professional sales culture. The results of this study show that we have achieved that and been able to demonstrate how investing in training and development, if done well, can translate into increased proftiability.

The academy is also an excellent way of attracting talented people to come to work at Ecclesiastical, which is vital for a specialist niche insurer that often requires a greater level of ability in its people than the more mainstream insurance companies.

Ecclesiastical’s sales academy training and development program was launched in August 2009 with 34 business-development managers and regional sales managers enrolling. During the next 12 months, the participants were observed in actual sales meetings by accredited coaches, evaluated and then given a program of personalized self-managed development including coaching, psychometric profiling and specific sales-orientated workshops. Participants’ progress was then evaluated again against a set of criteria validated by Cranfield Business School, including their individual sales figures.

Since creating the sales academy, Ecclesiastical has also launched academies for both claims and underwriting.