IconoClass: 3 months to train your future BtoB salespeople

IconoClass offers intensive 3-month training courses to prepare tomorrow's BtoB salespeople. In this interview, CEO Marie Taquet explains how she has achieved a 98% hiring rate for all her students.

IconoClass: the business school that teaches you to sell

If IconoClass is today listed as one of the best business schools, it's because Marie Taquet, its founder, as a great disappointment of traditional business schools, has taken the problem head-on to provide tangible solutions.

"I had two disappointing years in business school. I decided to turn this dissatisfaction into a mission and launch a training program more in line with what I felt I needed", explains Marie.

On her entrepreneurial career, she adds: "I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur, and besides, if tomorrow a member of my team is more suited than me to be CEO, then why not? What I love is creating, and with IconoClass, I'm fulfilling two of my needs: the need to build and the need to resolve a dissatisfaction."

Sales training to meet real business needs

When it comes to business studies, business schools seem to be the royal road. However, the truth is quite different: no matter how famous a business school may be, companies looking for salespeople always come up against the same problem: business school graduates don't know how to sell.

Paradoxical as it may seem, Marie explains:

‍"For a start, when I was a student, I was hallucinated by the boredom of the courses I attended. How is it possible to attend such expensive higher education, upwards of €50,000 for a Master's degree, and still be so bored?"

She goes on to add:

‍"Business schools are supposed to teach us a job, I find it dramatic to see young people leaving school at 23, not really knowing what they want to do, because the training they've been through has led them to be mediocre at everything, but specialized in nothing. In my opinion, it's not possible to excel in a field without having really polished the subject."

Time is also a major issue at IconoClass.

"I think it's crazy to think that you're going to spend 5 years of your life in business school, only to realize when you get there that it's not what you want to do. For me, time is an extremely important factor, because once lost, time is irrecoverable."

With this in mind, Marie wanted to develop very short, three-month training courses, but much more intense and focused on a single objective: to become a well-trained and operational sales person as soon as she joins the company.

To achieve this, IconoClass employs a precise strategy

"We don't pretend to teach our students all the subjects you'd find in a business school, because our students will never touch marketing or communications. We're training salespeople, so our aim is to teach them everything they need to know about this profession, from prospecting to closing, but also to know how to sell themselves, as individuals. That's why we've introduced a personal development module, because a salesperson who is uncomfortable with himself or herself and with others will never be able to sell. I sincerely believe that there is such a thing as the science of sales and recruitment, and that's exactly what we teach our students," explains Marie.

Business strategy and learning: flexibility at the heart of success

There is a huge gap between the reality of the market and the theory learned in class, preventing learners from being in tune with the tangible needs of companies.

"It's true that for business schools, changing a 5-year program is complicated. It can't be done in one summer. At IconoClass, we run courses over three months, which allows us to rework the content every quarter. Inertia is avoided at all costs, so as to always incorporate the latest the latest tools or new strategic directions to follow," says Marie.

In short, the IconoClass training model advocates learning based on real-life situations, linked in every respect to best sales practices and a genuine mastery of new uses and the most effective means of achieving sales targets.

With 98% of students hired directly on completion of their training, and an average gross salary of €3,500, IconoClass can pride itself on finally providing a real solution for all those who aspire to become tomorrow's top salespeople.