Designing a sales academy built for growth
How we helped Softcat turn the know-how of their best salespeople into an academy for all.
The know-how was stuck in a few heads
Softcat is growing fast, year on year. But like any large sales team, performance varied. Some people were consistently at the top. Others weren't there yet.
Softcat knew that if they could get everyone performing like their best people, they'd grow even faster. The strategies, knowledge and skills to do that already existed in the business. The problem was they were stuck in the heads of a small number of people.
There were three different things to get right: sales methodology and process, product knowledge, and the behaviours that make great salespeople great. And lots of different people to get them right for, from new graduate cohorts to technical specialists and enterprise sellers with years of experience. Each group had their own needs.
Softcat had a clear vision: an academy built around individual roles, giving people short, useful pieces of learning at the moment they need them, while they're doing the job.
Our vision was a step change - not just another program but to transform the way in which we enable our sales teams. This required us to rethink the traditional program approach and really codify what skills makes our sellers great, and provide them with learning solutions in multi-modalities that can be surfaced in the flow of work at the point of need.
We needed a partner who got our vision, had a modern approach and who would spar with us to get the very best outcome. Lima Delta have been fantastic at this, challenging us and going above and beyond in joining us on our vision.
Through our academy design service, we turned that vision into something real.
We ran workshops with the core project team and people from across the business, working through four areas:
Audience
Who the academy is for and what each role needs
Architecture
How it should be structured
Learning principles
The rules that would guide every decision
Learning journeys
The routes people would take through it
From there, we designed a solution that brings methodology, product knowledge and behaviours together around one central framework, instead of three separate tracks competing for people's time.
Then we built a working prototype of the academy.
Not a slide deck describing it, but something people could actually click through. That did two jobs. It showed stakeholders what the vision looked like in practice, and it got everyone agreed on what needed to be built next.
Georgie and George balanced empathy and understanding with challenge and innovation. They were able to take our organisational complexity and not just try and retrofit an existing solution to it, but create something that felt Softcat. They didn't shy away from the hard truths and brought their experience to help us avoid pitfalls.
It really felt like we were one team!
Softcat now have:
A practical map
For building the academy content, with clear ways to decide what goes in, what stays out, and which format works best for each piece.
One plan
Stakeholders across the business aligned behind it.
A clear path
To getting everyone selling like their best people, and growing faster because of it.
There is a lot of noise in our industry at the moment with consultancies and new products not being in short supply. But finding someone who partners with you, really seeks to understand and fits for you not the other way round is harder to find and that is exactly what Lima Delta have done for us.
We're just starting out on the journey and I'm excited about where we're heading together.
Wondering how we could help you?
There’s only one way to find out.