How We Are Developing the Best Sales Team in Our Sector
How We Are Developing the Best Sales Team in Our Sector
Some Context
To set the scene, the DCS sales team are the face of the biggest brands across the household and health and beauty categories. They sell to customers in wholesale, cash and carry, convenience, discount, high street and out of town retail, ‘away from home’ and the pharmacy channels.
As a business, we not only sell and distribute the biggest global brands in these categories we also provide the added value services of co-packing, export and own label manufacturing.
We are asking our sales team to do the very best for the supplier brands, the customers and for DCS - all at the same time. We call it the Triple Win – and it’s no mean feat!
The Story So Far
In the 26 years that DCS has been operating, we have developed homegrown sales talent through buddying and mentoring alongside recruiting experienced salespeople from other FMCG businesses. The formula has served us well. However, for the next phase of growth, we knew it would be crucial to invest in embedding the role model DCS way of selling which reflects this Triple Win mentality.
Our Approach
At the heart of our learning and development approach is a crystal clear view of what great looks like for us at every step of the sales process – one which we have formalised in sales competencies.
For everyone in sales, this has meant they know what they are aiming for in terms of knowledge, skills and application. It has given us a common language that supports feedback and development as well as recruitment and career progression.
We put category at the heart of sales so that our solutions are based on objective and up to date information. Our sales team are wonderfully supported in developing their expertise by our in-house Category Insights team.
The month-by-month programme of sales training which started in 2022 delivers workshops, modules and team sessions face to face, online and on Teams and is layered with feedback, coaching, work-withs and mentoring. It is based on the learning principle of 10-20-70 but in a ratio that works for us.
We deliberated about whether to mix sales experience levels in our formal training and realised it wasn’t an ‘either/or’ decision. We have had fantastic outcomes from workshops where our most junior salespeople learnt from Heads of Channels – and vice versa. And sometimes it has been the right learning solution to train different experience levels separately.
When I am thinking about our learning and development solutions I always come back to this, ‘How do we make it as easy as possible for our sales team to do the best job for customers, suppliers and DCS?’ It’s a guiding principle that is shaping both the training content and the order of priority.
To see what vacancies we currently have available, head over to our current vacancies page.