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Foundation in Entrepreneurial Sales (Certified)- Launching Now!

AIM

Sales is getting harder, with salespeople having to sell complex propositions to professional buyers and multiple stakeholders over long periods of time. Typically, the top 20% of sales staff deliver 80% of an organisation’s revenue but high-performing salespeople are hard to find, and even harder for a business to replicate.

Businesses know that they need high-performing, highly-skilled salespeople, but also know that they lack the means to teach and develop their sales staff. The resulting skills gap has created a global crisis in sales, with high-quality salespeople now being the 2nd hardest position for employers to fill.

This problem is real, and it is expensive for businesses. Turnover in sales staff is typically twice as high as most other business functions and the lack of an establish career path means employee loyalty is low.

ESI fixes this problem by teaching and certifying complex sales skills, behaviours and mindsets, over time, whilst on the job.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES 

ESI’s Foundation in Entrepreneurial Sales programme, is designed to develop the complex set of sales skills that employers are looking for in sales professionals today. The programme drives long-term behavioural change and an entrepreneurial mindset, helping salespeople to become self-motivated, commercially creative, and agile in their approach to problem-solving in the sales environment

As a graduate of the foundation programme you will:

  • Become results-orientated rather than task driven
  • Improve your time management skills
  • Develop business acumen and an awareness of the market in which you operate
  • Develop a deep understanding of how to collaborate with prospects and colleagues
  • Learn how to move from being a farmer to become a hunter when prospecting
  • Understand how manage a complex series of relationships with buyers and stakeholders
  • Develop problem-solving techniques
  • Learn how to be adaptable and creative in a sales context
  • Develop listening & questioning techniques

WHY ESI?

There are three key elements to the ESI programme, which makes us unique and which helps to take learners way beyond training. These are:

  • The ESI Curriculum
  • Certification Options
  • Our Digital-first Learning Model

THE ESI CURRICULUM

ESI has developed an innovative curriculum based the actual skills that real-world employers are looking for from salespeople today. The curriculum sets out to develop well-rounded, commercially astute, self-motivated salespeople capable of problem-solving and managing professional buyers through a long sales cycle.

CERTIFICATION OPTIONS

The ESI programme is University credit-rated by Glasgow Caledonian University. This unique certification allows salespeople the chance to develop and validate their sales skills like never before. Businesses, meanwhile, are able to develop their sales teams to benchmark their sales talent and to reward and recognise their star performers with a meaningful certification. Options include:

  • University credit-rated Professional Diploma (20 university-credit points, transferable on EQF framework)
  • ESI Professional Certificate
  • Digital Badges

OUR DIGITAL-FIRST LEARNING MODEL

Unlike outdated classroom- based training, ESI’s fully-online programme allows learners to develop complex skills and behaviours, over time, whilst on the job, at a time and place that suits the individual.

  • Learning in your pocket: Delivered 100% online, the digital-first learning model means that learning can happen at a time and place that suits you and on any device.
  • Work-based education: ESI invite each learner to refer to real-life, current, and past sales case studies when answering questions about the new concepts taught within the programme. In this way the work becomes highly personalised and immediately relevant to each learner, regardless of role of rank, and drives real business benefit quickly.
  • Learn in the morning, apply in the afternoon: By adopting and deploying learning within your organisation, employees can learn a concept in the morning or at lunchtime and immediately put it into action within the business.
  • Yearlong access to materials: Ongoing access to the digital modules gives learners enough time to fit their learning and development around other commitments. Participants have up to 12 months to work through the programme at their own pace, although it can be completed in 3-6 months if preferred. The content is available for refreshers at any point to keep them “sales-fit” and continually developing.

COURSE CONTENT

Designed to make learning work for you; the course is delivered entirely online and is self-paced. That means no time out of the office or rigid deadlines getting in the way of your business priorities.

The curriculum is broken down into 4 key sections; The Business of Sales, The Prospect, Working Practices, The Salesperson

The Business of Sales

 

Lesson 1. The Basics

  • Identify what you need to focus on in order to achieve improved sales results
  • Recognise the entrepreneurial environment factors that will impact your sales performance.

Lesson 2. Business Issue

  • Evaluate and validate your understanding of why a (your) business exists
  • Translate information you’re exposed to as a salesperson all day into credible market intelligence for your business
  • Be aware of what it means to have personal credibility as a salesperson (and why it matters) and
  • Collaborate with your business to achieve better sales results, for yourself and for your business.

The Prospect

Lesson 3. Customer

  • Evaluate the degree to which you understand the prospect’s buying cycle – when and whether they are likely to do a deal with you.
  • Appreciate that there are seen and unseen motivation related risks to a deal closing – individual motivations as well as institution motivations.
  • Ask better questions to help your prospects clearly articulate and explain their business issue, context and deal expectations.

Lesson 4. Transparency

  • Test and validate your understanding of the likelihood, quantum and timing of an economic transaction.
  • Appreciate that alignment between you and the prospect about the likelihood, quantum and timing of a transaction is built on transparency at any given moment.
  • Drive collaboration and partnership with the prospect and likely multiple stakeholders and recognise that this takes time and effort.

Working Practices

Lesson 5. Efficiency

  • Appreciate the much-overlooked importance of time to closing a sale.
  • Manage the impact different aspects of time have on the timing of an economic transaction.
  • Spend the right amount of time to achieve the required result – replicating the most direct route to a sale.

Lesson 6. Results

  • Understand that high-performance selling means that every sales activity has an expected result.
  • Implement a results-focused approach to achieving sales goals.
  • Deliver other valuable, or non-financial, deliverables to the business in the course of doing your work.

The Salesperson

Lesson 7. Attitude

  • Have an honest and delusion-free relationship with yourself.
  • Be persistent, overcome adversity, stay motivated and resilient – because delivering high performance in Entrepreneurial Sales is hard.

Lesson 8. High Performance

  • Be professional and responsive to the B2B sales environment where businesses are selling to businesses.
  • Invest time and effort in constantly developing and honing a range of skills and talents necessary for Entrepreneurial Sales.
  • Respond to the fact that a business that has aspirations to grow must constantly learn and respond to the market reality. As must you.

Learners also have access to a digital library, providing a wealth of additional learning content for those wishing to get stuck under the bonnet

All learners will be asked to record their answers and thoughts in a digital portfolio which are the submitted for assessment. The programme uses practical tasks, reflective exercises, webinars, work-based assignments, and further digital content to support each individual learning journey.

 

TARGET AUDIENCE

The ESI programme will draw on your unique sales experience – whether limited or substantial – to help you develop the skills and mindset to drive sales performance. As such, the programme would suit:

  • Experienced sales executives or managers looking to strengthen and certify their sales skills.
  • Existing sales or customer success practitioners with limited experience of managing a sales pipeline looking for a certification to support their career development.

 

DATES & VENUES

 

  • Since the programme is delivered fully on-line and is self-paced, access can begin immediately
  • All learning delivered via a secure, cloud-based platform
    • Accessible from desktop or mobile devices
    • Virtual webinars hosted monthly
    • Learner support included within the package

FEES

  • The programme is part-funded by ISME Skillnet so that you can leverage up to 50% off RRP
  • Full Price is €1,300 per learner, but subsidized with Skillnet the fees are:
    • ISME Member pricing starts from €520 per learner
    • Non-Member pricing starts from €650 per learner