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ACHIEVE FIRST CLASS BUSINESS GROWTH WITH SPICERS ACADEMY
Date Published: 07/04/2010
Spicers, Europe’s leading wholesaler of office products, has launched the Spicers Academy, a comprehensive training and development portal to help dealers grow their business.
This web-based training solution aims to address the difficulties faced with traditional training programmes – for example cost, lack of time to commit to days out of the business, the relevance of the training to the dealer’s staff and lack of support for individual product categories. The Spicers Academy allows dealers to pick ’n’ mix the training modules to suit their needs, undertake pre-set development streams or build their own programmes specific to their staff. This flexible solution allows dealers and their staff to complete the courses at their own pace, anywhere they have access to the internet, and in bite-sized modules that can be easily fitted into the working day.
Following a pilot of the Spicers Academy, Andy Unstead, Sales Director at Just Office, says: “The Spicers Academy has proved to be a real-eye opener, and has had a huge impact on our business performance. Through utilising the skills learnt on the Spicers Academy, we have achieved a 28% increase in the conversion ratio of prospects to customers. This is directly attributable to the know-how we developed through the Spicers Academy portal.”
There will be 22 training modules available on the Academy at the outset, to include amongst others: how to increase your sales, field-based selling, how to PR your business and presentation skills. In addition, there will be a broad range of product training delivered by key suppliers in each category, to enable dealers to train their customer facing staff to sell the products more effectively and increase turnover in these categories. All of the training is fully trackable by the dealer principal, enabling full visibility of the training undertaken or outstanding, assessment results and improvements delivered.
Jane Rowe, Marketing and Communications Director at Spicers UK, says: “It’s really important for us to continually add value to our dealers businesses and help them to grow. People are at the heart of every business, and focus must be on providing staff with the necessary training and knowledge development. We’ve put a lot of investment into the Academy to ensure dealers can get the most out of it.”
The Academy was developed following feedback from the 2009 Synergy Roadshows, and will continue to evolve to reflect dealer needs. It is available exclusively to Synergy dealers for an initial period, and will be available to all Spicers dealers in June 2010.