VMware

I engaged Think Works to work with my Enterprise Sales team to develop a high performance sales culture and to equip the group to realise more from their client relationships whilst delivering upon a background of change in the business and the marketplace.

The team is made up of senior level, well-seasoned account executives, solution architects, product specialist sales people, consulting services and marketing resources, selling complex solutions where relationships are key to that success. Inevitably, this group have all completed many variations of standard sales skills training, and I was looking for something complementary but very different. Simon’s delivery of the more subtle, yet vital behavioural side of sales development was superb, engaging everyone in the group beyond even my high expectations. His knowledge of human behaviour and interaction is vast and he has the ability to get the complexity of that subject across in a way that really pulls everyone in. We all learnt an enormous amount over the course of the programme, about ourselves, our influence with others and the neurology and psychology of value based selling.

The team applied the tools, and the shift in mindset that resulted made a significant contribution to performance, both in the short term as we achieved a record half, achieving 200% of our target and over the longer term where we have built our business opportunity and continued to see growth and strategic impact. Sales is a tough environment – often dependant upon external factors such as market conditions. Simon taught us how to take control of the controllables and maximise our outputs even when the uncontrollables are not always in our favour.

The work we did lives on with the team and we continue to refer back to the lessons we learnt.