With high-energy meetings, competitive rankings and a focus on both soft and technical skills, YESA has taken training salespeople to a new level.
YESA, which stands for Young Entrepreneur’s Sales Academy, trains young people who want to get into the world of sales and teaches them the necessities of working in the industry with real-world experience.
“We take young people anywhere from 18 to 25, and we bring them in and we help them,” said Matt Elieff, Chief Marketing Officer of Burlington-based YESA. “They learn marketable skills. Maybe they’ve never done sales before, maybe they don’t know anything about business, but we teach them the basics and the foundations of selling and how to communicate so they can grow into leadership positions.”
Over the course of their time with YESA, salespeople go from learning theory to making real sales and even to leading their own small team.
Employees at YESA are encouraged to compete with one another over the course of a ‘season’, a four-month game based around popular sports such as Formula One racing, Ultimate Fighting Championship or Major League Baseball. Each season is based on a different sport and comes with a different focus, such as teamwork or individual skills, and salespeople are ranked based on their accomplishments each morning.
“The cool part about these games is it keeps people engaged for a longer period of time,” Elieff said. “We have micro games on a weekly basis, while a season game is four months. Bigger games like President’s Club and Closer’s Club are something they compete in for a year, so it encourages them to stick around and develop themselves. We have guys on our team who have been here for two or three years and they’re different people than when they came in.”
The morning meetings are complete with a ‘sports update’ show filmed in the office that speaks about the changes in rankings and who has been excelling. Employees who perform the best by the end of a season win cash prizes and merchandise.
Despite the high-energy atmosphere, YESA heavily focuses on data and statistics behind the scenes. Each employee’s sales are tracked and viewed as trends, giving management a way to see who has been improving in real time.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Corrie Elieff, CEO of YESA, said. “Statistics keep everybody honest, they prevent a guy from just telling you a story. We can see the trends, I might have a conversation with someone and ask why we’re trending downward. We all have bad weeks, but if it becomes a trend then maybe there’s something going on.”
The training is part theory and part practical knowledge. Employees learn through traditional lessons and presentations from team leaders and online modules, and get hands-on experience with the products they are selling before going out into the field. The company also has an area in the office full of doors that are used for roleplaying customer interactions.
YESA operates across Ontario and has around 130 members of staff in the province. The company has several shared houses for their travelling employees to stay at while working abroad, which Corrie says he runs to help young entrepreneurs avoid the difficulties he faced earlier in life.
“I lived that life,” Corrie said. “I lived in a warehouse, I was on road trips with sales guys and we’d share beds, and I never wanted our sales business to become the same as what I went through while building my career.”
YESA hopes to expand their operations to the United States in the future.
