Franchise in the spotlight: Sandler Training

Often the path that leads to someone running their own franchise is rather artificial. Once they’ve made the conscious decision to purchase a franchise,”a good part of their journey is a trawl of franchise publications and shows, and”meeting and greeting various franchisors making the hard sell. But, for Shaun Thomson, becoming CEO and master franchisor of Sandler UK was a much more natural journey. “I didn’t go out thinking, ‘I wonder where”I can get a sales training company from?'””he explains. “It was an evolution.”

Even before taking on Sandler Training, Thomson was no stranger to the world of”sales. “I worked with companies such as Apple, HP, IB and Lucent Technologies setting up channels and that type of stuff in 56 different countries,” he remarks. Despite working for such high-profile firms, Thomson found that what he was interested in was”the entrepreneurial elements of his role. One of the best examples of this was a European division he set up for Lucent Technologies for one of its new pieces of software. “When I started, really the division was just me and”I grew that to a $35m turnover business,””he comments.

It was perhaps inevitable then that eventually he would come to set up his own sales and marketing enterprise. But even though the firm grew very quickly, Thomson began”to realise he had a problem on his hands; despite setting up sales meetings for his”staff across the UK, they were receiving”very few conversions. “I’d ask, ‘How did”you get on?'” he recalls. “And I used to hear things like, ‘Yeah, great, brilliant!’, ‘Oh fantastic – what did they buy?’ ‘Oh no,”they didn’t buy anything.'” Fortunately,”a watershed moment came when he relayed this situation to an ex-colleague from Lucent in the US. “He said to me, ‘What you need is Sandler Training’,” relays Thomson.”

Thomson found the training was a real eye-opener. “I had many what I call ‘ah-hah’ moments,” he says. On his return to the”UK, he promptly put his staff into one of its programmes and received some very striking results. “Over about an eight-month period with the same people – I didn’t lose or gain anybody and we were selling the same stuff – I doubled my business.” This sparked his interest in Sandler Training.

When he asked why they didn’t have any UK training centres, they asked him whether he knew anyone who would be interested in buying the master franchise rights. “I said, ‘Leave that with me’,” he laughs. They soon began discussions and he bought the rights”for the UK in 2003. “The reality was that I’d been a customer, so I knew it worked over here.” After running his pilot centre in Oxford for a year to ascertain whether there were”any last tweaks to be made to the model, Thomson began to add franchisees.