Team development and Training

As the photonics sales process has changed significantly in the last decade and the range of applications grows, HR team face the unenviable challenge of finding sales and business development professionals to drive their company's growth. In addition to the already challenging areas of fit to company culture and compensation expectations, they are now faced with deep technical requirement and market experience which are beyond the experience levels of most HR professionals. Asking HR professionals to identify technically adept people with experience in the target industries is a tall order, but help is available. 

With our deep understanding of the products you offer and the markets you hope to be successful in, we can quickly generate a spectrum of profiles that are likely to be successful. Then, with our vast networks in USA, Europe and Asia, we can rapidly identify qualified candidates to enter your formal HR process. In short, our support allows your HR team to work with pre-screened candidates who have a very high probability of succes in the tasks ahead.

Once a candidate has been secured, Sustainable Photonics works with your HR team to ensure a successful onboarding. Our work in this domain goes far beyond the traditional onboarding process to include candidate specific training (filling in gaps in their education or experience) and customer specific applications and sales training. In this way, your candidate starts to add value straight away with real customer (in a managed, chaperoned way) and will enjoy the early successes that will convince them they have made the right choice, thereby reducing concerns around retention. A common complaint for new hires, often as they resign is "I didn't receive adequate training" while a common employer complaint is "The employee failed to deliver fast enough". The Sustainable Photonics approach addresses both of these questions.

While there are a number of excellent sales training courses available in some cities, none focus on the challenge of taking engineers and scientists and preparing them for sales in the photonics world. 

We have developed a sales course targetted to our industry which is the result of decades of success in developing industry leadng teams across the world. Our course entitled "The Reluctant Salesperson" develops a unique, process based approach to sales which is appealing to those with engineering or scientific backgrounds. We remove the mystique around sales and coach individuals to understand that the 'slick, fast talking' stereotype they may have of sales people is not only incorrect, but also would not be a good fit for the photonics industry. 

We develop the sales professional with a mixture of techniques, role-plays and case studies which they can personalize to themselves and localize to their culture, while still adhereing to a robust process driven approach. No longer do you have to try "make sales people out of engineers", rather we can let them excel in a way that suits them and delivers on the company goals.

Our approach to business development and sales comes from a perspective of data driven decision making. Our work in this area goes beyond the sales professional to include product management, marketing and even functions such as finance. We build a whole team approach to the sales process and deliver a hollistic understanding of value of data to delivering success.

As an example, we train sales professionals to record all relevant information in a Customer Resource Management (CRM) software not because "it is company policy" but because by using the CRM correctly, they will get the support needed from other teams. The knock-on effects of this work are immense and result in more accurate forecasting and budgeting, less pressure on customer delivery dates and better optimization of manufacturing and supply chains to name but a few.