QAS uses Gazing to speak the Language of Success

QAS uses Gazing to speak the Language of Success

There are probably more stereotypes surrounding the sales team than any other department within a company. Members of sales teams are, by general consensus, believed to be unbelievably pushy, always refuse to take no for an answer and are, to a person, job-hopping mavericks who won’t toe the corporate line and whose primary concern in life is the size of their bonus!

For one British company, QAS, the reality is very different. Its sales team can point to lengthy careers within the company and a consistently successful performance based on close teamwork that has cemented the company into a market leader position, despite intense pressure from the competition.

And some of its recent success can be attributed to its partnership with Gazing Performance, who has provided QAS with a sales framework that is standing the test of time, in the most rigorous of conditions.

QAS first set up in 1990, has experienced extraordinary growth to become the UK’s market leader in address management and data accuracy solutions. Today, the company employs more than 400 people across the UK, USA, Europe and Asia and handles more than 9,400 customers including market leaders, blue chips and public sector departments.

Despite backing from its parent Experian (itself part of the GUS group) and an impressive year on year revenue growth, the company knows that it can’t afford to rest on its laurels as the marketspace that it occupies – helping organisations to manage the integrity of their data – comes under increasing pressure in the form of legislation, constant threats to computer security and changing consumer attitudes towards data privacy. Selecting and retaining a new sales training provider, then, formed an important part of the sales management’s strategy to keep things fresh. Crucially, for them, the new training supplier had to be able to handle a sizeable sales operation and could offer a training framework that provided a consistent approach; in addition coaching could play an important role.

According to John Sharman and Stuart Johnston, the QAS sales managers that originally headed up the selection process, this narrowed the field of likely contenders considerably. John said, “We had a clear set of decision criteria in terms of what we were looking for, but the most important was that the supplier had to offer an approach that could be equally applicable to a graduate working in our telesales operation, to an experienced sales person with ten to twelve years’ experience of working at the sharp end of selling. We also wanted to work with someone who had an equally pragmatic attitude and so wouldn’t burden us with theory”.
Unusually for an industry more closely associated with high staff turnover, QAS has a policy of ‘growing its own’ and both John and Stuart were clear that to help their staff continuously develop and grow into new jobs, there had to be a uniform approach to sales so that, as today’s graduate trainee could be tomorrow’s sales manager, they could use the same set of tools and the same language.

Stuart said, “New starters can often feel left out as they don’t understand the language used in the company. Similarly when someone gets promoted or changes jobs, we could not afford for them to have to learn a new terminology. Flexibility is important to us and we needed to make sure that the incoming sales trainers could match that”.