Global sales and marketing training company Imparta has acquired Procter Consultancy Ltd., a UK-based training and consultancy firm specialising in service excellence and culture change. This move consolidates Imparta’s position as one of the UK’s leading specialist training companies, and reinforces its ability to drive clients’ performance by strengthening and aligning their sales, marketing and service activities.
Imparta, which was recently ranked among the top three global sales training companies by the US-based consultancy ES Research Group, goes beyond training to create real performance improvement for its clients. The company grew organically through the recession, using its own Sales Academy approach to drive sales at a time when many training companies saw their revenues fall significantly. Imparta is a rapidly emerging player in the global market, and its strategic plans for 2010 (of which this acquisition is the first step) include the launch of several new products and an expansion of its global operations.
Procter’s work is highly complementary to that of Imparta, helping clients to create a customer-focused culture to increase customer satisfaction, improve people engagement and drive revenue. Procter’s service improvement approaches are frequently deployed in contact centres, however more recently they are being applied across all channels to ensure a seamless customer contact strategy.
Richard Barkey, Imparta’s founder and CEO, commented “Procter has an outstanding reputation for delivering service improvement, and the acquisition will reinforce Imparta’s ability to add value to Sales and Marketing directors across the breadth and depth of their businesses. In an online world, customers share their experiences, and they are increasingly unforgiving. For organisations in both the private and public sectors, it is critical to ensure that the customer experience delivers on the promises made by sales and marketing, especially at a time when budgets are under significant pressure. Together, Imparta and Procter are now uniquely positioned to assist with this issue”.
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Like Imparta, Procter focuses on serving large organisations. The company’s clients include Barclays, Lloyds, VW, the MoD, and several Police forces. Jo Thomson, Procter’s MD, commented “Imparta’s philosophy around training and reinforcement aligns tightly with ours, and their resources, tools and expertise will make the process of achieving service excellence and culture change even more efficient and effective. In particular, Imparta’s assessment and simulation products will help us to drive the changes even deeper into our clients’ organisations, and the ability to offer training on a global basis will allow us to serve them more broadly.”
The combined company will employ more than 50 people, with a further 70 associate coaches and trainers around the world, and sales of approx. £6.2 million with further growth of 10-20% expected in 2010.
