We believe sales is a profession
Professional Sales Academy exists to raise the standard of selling, by helping people build the behaviours that make a real, lasting difference to their results.
Why I started PSA
Sales is a profession, and professionals never stop learning. We’ll never stop refining how we help them do it.
I’ve worked in solution sales since I was 19 and, like most salespeople, I learned the profession on the job rather than at university.
I came to training almost by accident. I was running a prospecting business, getting people through the door, when I realised they also needed help to finish the sale.
Years later, while running a sales academy for around 1,000 salespeople, I kept seeing the same faces return the following year with the same challenges. They were engaged, and they believed in the skills. But targets, client demands, time on the road and familiar habits meant very little changed in the sales day.
Watching good training make so little difference was demoralising, and it left me with one question: what would it actually take for people to change?
That question has shaped everything I’ve built since. I want salespeople to understand why a skill matters, not just how to do it, and to have the time and support to make change stick. I want their managers to become the coaches who keep it going.
I want sales treated as the profession it is, with proper standards rather than tricks picked up along the way. And I want that kind of development, usually only open to large organisations, within reach of the smaller businesses that need it just as much.
That’s why PSA exists.
We’ve learned a great deal since we started, and we’re still learning. Helping people perform at their best is never finished, and neither is our work on how to do it well.
Three principles behind everything we do
Sales is a performance
Like any performance, it improves through practice, feedback and discipline, not knowledge alone.
Change takes time
Lasting behaviour change happens little and often, over months, with support along the way.
Professionals deserve recognition
A certificate of training completion, endorsed by the Institute of Sales Professionals, rewards growth and marks sales as a career worth taking seriously.
Equal to or greater than
Our mark is the ≥ symbol, and it stands for a simple idea: you are equal to or greater than the behaviours you adopt. The behaviours you bring shape the success you have, and over time they compound, so the result becomes even greater than the sum of its parts.
Better behaviours. Greater results.
The people behind your progress
Experienced sales professionals and coaches who know what it takes to change behaviour under pressure.
Alison Matthias FISP
Managing DirectorA Fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals with 30 years in sales and sales education, specialising in behaviour change and performance. Alison is a Trustee of The Salespeople’s Charity, and is DISC and Insights accredited.
Ruby Creagh
Associate, Leadership and TeamsRuby successfully scaled and sold three businesses by the age of 30, and has spent the last decade in event leadership.
Mike Gibson FISP
Head of Finance and OperationsA Fellow of the Institute of Sales Professionals and former Sales Director at Royal Mail Group, where he introduced Royal Mail’s first sales apprenticeships.
Our programmes are built on professional competencies endorsed by the Institute of Sales Professionals, the professional body for sales. For your people, that means training to a recognised standard, and a certificate that proves it.
About the Institute of Sales Professionals →
Ready to make change happen?
Whether it’s your team or your own career, we’d love to hear what you’re working towards.