About Us

Our Mission

Our mission is to use all of our sales and sales management experience to help Sales Leaders and Sales Managers to develop their sales team’s full potential. We do this with a range of innovative on line sales processes, tools, templates, sales management aids, workshops and lots of helpful advice and guidance!

Tony Hillyard, Managing Director of The Sales Academy writes:

“When I first entered the sales profession, some 35 years ago, IBM, the Company I worked for, sent me off to their residential Sales School for four whole weeks! Every new salesperson, no matter how much prior experience and training they had was required to attend - and ‘pass’ to their exacting standards. I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was to be given that superb foundation for my professional sales skills.

Of course, they (IBM) also benefited from the fact that the Sales School ensured that all of their sales processes and an unusually high standard of sales skills were disseminated consistently throughout their sales organisation. Similarly, when I first took up the challenge of Sales Management I was sent off to ‘Sales Management School’.

Although I attended many other training courses over the years, most of them very good, it was these fundamental skills and processes that I was able to build on over the years and which undoubtedly led to the success I was fortunate to enjoy in my Corporate career as a salesperson, a sales manager and as a general manager.

Sadly the days of superb, ‘in house’ sales training are almost gone. Many companies today, even the largest, can no longer afford the luxury of running the workshops and training courses to provide an internal sales or sales management academy. Some aren’t even in a position to send their sales teams on a basic one day training course. Sadly, today’s sales managers and sales professionals will be the losers; and very rapidly, so will be the businesses, large and small, that they work for, to say nothing of their customers!

Nevertheless, that is today’s sobering reality and new, smarter ways now have to be found to allow sales professionals to develop their full potential and deliver outstanding results for their companies, their customers and for themselves.

Now, more than ever, businesses need sound, effective and consistent sales processes to provide a framework for the coaching and learning which leads to sales productivity gains. Now more than ever in this turbulent marketplace, salespeople need to hone their sales skills and build their knowledge of professional sales methodologies to enjoy consistent success.

In 1999 I decided to try and bridge this ever widening gap, forming Sales & Marketing Solutions Ltd. as a sales development consulting practice. A year or two later I set up The Sales Academy. It was the latter that was to become the vehicle for my ambition of offering businesses, large and small, a way of gaining all the benefits of their own ‘Sales Academy’ for their salespeople and sales managers, but at a fraction of the cost.

Our goal at The Sales Academy therefore, is to provide easy and affordable access for our customers to sound, effective sales processes and great sales skills that can be applied throughout their sales teams.

The Sales Academy Suite of products, tools, planning templates, sales management aids and sales processes delivers this. As well as providing day to day practical and pragmatic help across the broad spread of sales tasks, simple to advanced, the Sales Academy Suite with on-screen guides and contextual help functions can become an on-line and on-demand Sales Academy for our customers - with all of the learning, advice and guidance always available and accessible.”