Ian Fishwick has led Adept Telecom through around a dozen acquisitions and earlier this year took the company through to a listing on AIM – a move that will see Adept grow further.
“Once we had floated I sat back and thought ‘This industry has been quite good to me – I have made a decent living at it for the last twenty odd years’. The Telecom Sales Academy started off as an idea of how to put something back in to the industry where currently there is a gap.”
My background is working for very large companies and I tried to think back and analyse; now I am running my own small business, what were the differences between then and now, between this and my old life. There are a lot of plusses in running a small business but what is definitely clear to me is that people don’t spend money on training. It is very difficult to take time off work and difficult to find money to pay for the cost of training. People kid themselves and say ‘Oh yeah, I do training. I was at Avaya or Panasonic last week.’ But that is product training and either free or low cost. How many great products do you know that have not done well because it’s nothing to do with the product it is because people don’t know how to sell?”
“Where is that fundamental training that tells you how to get appointments, how do you get through the door and how do you behave once you are there? In the years that I have been in this industry I don’t see that kind of facility that is free. Like many things, it is not difficult to do as long as someone has the will to do it.”
“Our industry is dominated by technical or product training; how does something work, or how do you install or repair it? We believe that there is an ongoing need for basic sales training that has nothing to do with a product. We are trying to boost the sales of the industry; just a 1% increase in sales for the UK Telecom's industry is a massive number.
Interestingly, every one of the four sponsor companies signed up within a five minute conversation. The first event is on 8 June at the Cable & Wireless building in Reading and the training will be carried out by our Sales Director Chris Riggs who used run a professional sales training business.”
Places are to be limited to around 50 delegates for each of the sessions
The format of the day will be simple, following a brief introduction by Comms Business Magazine and the host company, the main aim is to deliver a two hour training course on the ‘Six Steps to Professional Selling’.
Adept’s role in this is to put together the Telecom Sales Academy web site, write up all of the training courses and have Chris Riggs deliver the training.
Six Steps:
Finding New Business
Selling the Appointment
Customer relationships
Sales Skills
Planning and Managing the Pipeline
Closing the Sale
We recognise that people are busy and we can cover off these six steps in one two hour training session – there’s no need to attend the whole series. The investment for those that are lucky enough to attend is a morning, followed by a lunch.
This offer is open to all readers of Comms Business Magazine and the courses are suitable for telecoms sales professional no matter which part of the sector they are operating in whether minutes, or hardware based sales.
Richard Bligh, Marketing Director at Gamma Telecom, “We are delighted to support this initiative as Gamma Believes that professional selling is a key enabler for small entrepreneurial business to grow successfully and to compete against the big boys in our marketplace.”
The Telecom Sales Academy: Venues & Dates
Cable & Wireless (Reading) 8 June 2006
THUS (Venue TBA) September 2006
Verizon (Reading) December 2006
Gamma Telecom (Venue TBA) March 2007
If you are interested in attending the Telecom Sales Academy and receiving free training then visit the Academy web site straight away.
More Information: www.ttsa.org.uk