The Virtual Sales Academy re-imagines how sales training is delivered and significantly raises the bar for online sales training. The Academy was originally designed by Imparta in collaboration with Cisco for their Global Virtual Sales & Customer Success Organisation.

"Face-to-face training is expensive and does not always engage a largely millennial sales force, yet traditional eLearning fails to build real-world skills," said Richard Barkey, CEO of Imparta. "We've re-imagined sales training by taking the best of what we know works in the traditional sales training world: the skill building, the assessments, the importance of manager interaction and coaching, and the play on the natural competitive instincts of salespeople. We've combined all that with the advantages digital learning offers: 24/7 learning, experiential scenarios and simulations, gamification, and online social interactions. We have been determined to give learners the best possible experience."

The curriculum
At the heart of the Virtual Sales Academy is the concept of customer centricity. This concept is central to Imparta's proven Creating Client Value sales methodology, as deployed by leading sales organisations including GE, Intel, Cisco, and Telefonica. Delegates learn how to build their position as a trusted adviser to their clients. They hone their ability to understand and influence the decision process in order to add value to it, but also to make sure that they maximise their win rate and the return on their invested time.

Who benefits?
"The Virtual Sales Academy responds to many of the ongoing challenges faced by sales and L&D leaders," said Janet Garcia, Imparta's Commercial Director. "The Academy is perfect for getting new hires up and running and accelerating their first sale. It helps L&D teams with limited budgets extend the reach of their training and provides a platform for establishing a common understanding of client-centric sales language, particularly for organisations with dispersed sales forces."

Client feedback
Director of Cisco's EMEA Sales Acceleration team, Tania Day, led the Cisco team that collaborated on the initial development of the Virtual Sales Academy as the Academy's first customer. She said, "We couldn't find one, complete digital solution in the market that we believed would achieve our goals, so we asked Imparta to help us re-imagine digital sales training. The programme has been incredibly well received, particularly the interactivity of the sales simulations and the multiple learning media, which appeal to our millennial learners. It's really scalable, and while our prime objective was the speed to productivity of new sales hires, we've also projected savings of over $1 million in three years."