Sales Training and Coaching in Belfast and Northern Ireland
Sales Training and Coaching for Teams in Belfast and Northern Ireland
Move your business – and yourself – forward.
Shift Control is a sales training and coaching consultancy based in Belfast, run by Paul McAnallen, working with sales teams, leaders and individuals across Northern Ireland. Whether you want to improve sales performance, develop your team or find clearer direction in your working life, Shift Control helps you understand what needs to change and take practical steps towards it.
I’m Paul McAnallen. I bring over 30 years of commercial experience and a personal coaching approach to my work with business owners, sales leaders, teams and individuals.
A conversation about where you are, what you want to achieve and how I might help.
Where do you want to make progress?
Sales training and development
Build the skills and habits your team needs to sell more effectively, with practical training and follow-up coaching grounded in real customer conversations.
Coaching for sales, work or life in general
Make space to think, build confidence and find your next step—with one-to-one coaching for sales professionals, leaders and people navigating career or personal change.
Want to find out how well your sales team is performing?
Take 5 minutes to fill in this short questionnaire based on the 5 the pillars of high performance teams – covering strategy, behaviours, habits and communication. Answer honestly and without too much over thinking.
[Explore the SHIFT Diagnostic]
Frequently asked questions
How do you integrate sales training and sales coaching, and do I need both?
Training builds a shared set of skills and language across a team, usually in a group setting. Coaching applies that to one person’s specific deals, habits and blind spots, one-to-one. Training without coaching tends to fade within weeks because there’s nothing holding the new behaviour in place once the session ends. Most teams benefit from both, but a single experienced salesperson who already has the skills may only need coaching.
My sales team has years of experience — why would they need training?
Experience builds habits, but not all habits are effective ones, and long-serving salespeople are often the most resistant to examining what they do on a call. Training isn’t remedial; it’s a structured way to make existing habits visible, compare them against what actually works, and adjust the ones that are costing deals without anyone noticing.
How do you know if training and coaching has actually worked?
Agree what “working” looks like before starting – conversion rate, average deal size, pipeline stage movement, or a specific behaviour like fewer discounted deals. Track it against a baseline from before the programme starts. If a provider can’t tell you how they’ll measure impact, that’s worth asking about directly.
What if the training doesn’t fit how my team already sells?
This is a fair concern with generic, off-the-shelf programmes. It’s addressed by starting from how the team currently sells – through the SHIFT diagnostic or an initial conversation – rather than delivering a fixed course and hoping it lands. The training should adapt to the sales process already in place, not replace it with someone else’s framework.
Is this only for underperforming teams, or does it help teams that are already hitting target?
Teams that are hitting target still have room between what they’re doing and what’s possible — often in areas like deal size, sales cycle length, or win rate against competitors, rather than volume of activity. A team that’s already performing is often better placed to act on coaching because there’s less resistance to work through first.
What does it cost, and what affects the price?
Cost depends on team size, whether it’s training only or training plus ongoing coaching, and how long the engagement runs. Rather than publish a generic figure, the free 30-minute call is used to understand the situation first and give an accurate quote based on what’s actually needed, not a one-size package.
I don’t have time to be closely involved – can this still work?
Leadership involvement improves results, but it doesn’t have to mean daily involvement. What matters more is agreeing the goals and success measures up front, and reviewing progress at set intervals, rather than being in every coaching session. That structure can be set up in the initial call.
How is this different from working with a sales trainer who isn’t also a coach?
Most sales trainers deliver the session and leave; the reinforcement – coaching individuals on real calls and deals afterwards – is usually left to the business to figure out on its own, or doesn’t happen. Combining both under one person means the coaching is grounded in exactly what was taught, rather than a second provider starting from scratch.
Book a call
Book a free 30-minute call directly into my calendar: