“How can we refresh our existing salespeople and improve our newbies?”

What They Needed

Marlowe Fire & Security brought together a sales team with very different levels of experience. The group included several highly experienced sales professionals who had attended multiple sales workshops previously, alongside others who were new to sales and had little formal training.

Key challenges included:

• Inconsistent sales capability across the team
  Experienced salespeople had established habits, while newer team members lacked structure and confidence, resulting in inconsistent sales conversations.

A need to reinforce fundamentals while building new skills
The programme needed to refresh core sales disciplines for experienced delegates, without disengaging them, while also equipping newer salespeople with essential skills.

• Gaps in qualification and questioning
  Sales conversations often relied on closed questions, with salespeople dominating discussions rather than allowing customers to talk and reveal needs.
• Missed insight during customer conversations
  Opportunities were being lost due to a lack of structured qualification and insufficient exploration of customer motivations and requirements.
• Maintaining engagement across mixed experience levels
  The training needed to feel relevant, practical and credible for everyone in the room.

In short: How do we deliver a sales programme that refreshes experienced salespeople while building strong foundations for those new to sales?

What We Did

The programme focused on strengthening performance across the full sales cycle, including qualification, questioning, value creation, follow-up and closing.

Key elements included:

• Re-establishing the fundamentals of effective selling
  Revisiting core principles such as understanding customer needs, structuring conversations and using purposeful questioning.
• Practical qualification frameworks
  Helping the team identify real opportunities earlier, reduce wasted effort and improve focus on winnable business.
• Improving questioning and listening skills
  Shifting from closed, sales-led questioning to open, customer-led conversations that uncover deeper insight.
• Using site visits and conversations more strategically
  Treating surveys and meetings as sales conversations, not just technical exercises.
• Closing and follow-up with confidence
  Strengthening how proposals are followed up and how next steps are agreed.

The course focused on practical behaviour based learning, helping the team move away from inconsistent habits and towards a clear, professional and unified sales approach.

Adapting in real time to maximise impact
During delivery, the trainer recognised that day one initially felt routine for the more experienced salespeople. To address this, a new roleplay was introduced overnight:

• Experienced salespeople played the role of the customer
• Less experienced delegates worked in teams to qualify the opportunity and feed back their findings

The debrief proved highly impactful. The group clearly saw how much information was missed when the qualification structure wasn’t followed and received direct feedback on their questioning style, particularly the overuse of closed questions and talking too much.

At the client’s request, the LinkedIn module was removed, as this would be covered by their parent company, Mitie, following the recent acquisition.