· Ivelin Kozarev · Sales Training · 6 min read
How Just Eat Takeaway Trained 69 Field Reps and Measured a 33.9% Skill Improvement in 10 Days
How Just Eat Takeaway, It's Not What You Think, and Skylar combined live training with AI practice to drive measurable skill gains across 69 field reps in 10 days.
Dave trains sales teams for a living. He’s good at it. He runs a business called It’s Not What You Think, and companies like Just Eat Takeaway bring him in when they need their reps to actually get better - not just feel good about a workshop.
Here’s the problem Dave kept hitting.
He’d spend two days with a team. Teach them discovery. Active listening. How to pitch without sounding like a brochure. The room would be buzzing. People would be nodding. Managers would be smiling.
Then everyone goes home. And within a month, 75% of it is gone.
Not because the training was bad. Because there was no way to practise. The only tool available was role-play - and every salesperson on earth has the same reaction to that word.
“When a trainer says role play, everyone runs for the hills. It’s cringe.”
- Dave, Sales Trainer, It’s Not What You Think
So when Just Eat Takeaway asked Dave to train 69 field reps, he did something different. He brought Skylar in alongside him.
What Just Eat was dealing with
69 reps. Most in their first or second sales role. Spread across the UK. The default was transactional - pitch the product, chase the close, move on.
The leadership team didn’t just want a “good training day.”
“We wanted to make sure that the training was measurable and that we could demonstrate the commercial impact back to the business.”
- Dan Regan, Head of Sales, Just Eat
The brief was clear: shift the team from transactional selling to consultative partnerships. And prove it actually happened.
How Dave and Skylar worked together
Dave brought the method. Three frameworks covering discovery, pitching, and active listening. Live actors on stage modelling what good looks like. 69 people in a room feeding off each other’s energy. And the thing no AI can replicate - a trainer reading the room, knowing when to push, when to pause.
Skylar brought the reps. After Dave taught a framework, reps immediately practised it with AI buyers built on real Just Eat customer conversations. No colleagues watching. No manager scoring them. Just a private space to try, fail, get feedback, and try again.
Here’s the key: Dave and Skylar co-designed the scenarios. The AI buyers weren’t generic. They had the objections, the personalities, and the situations that Just Eat reps actually face in the field. Dave’s expertise, baked into something every rep could access on their phone.
Connor Roberts, a Regional Sales Manager, was asked to test Skylar before the workshop. He expected five minutes. He stayed for 42.
“I sat there for 42 minutes having a conversation… the flexibility of the tool as well as the quality of the tool is a real stand out.”
- Connor Roberts, Regional Sales Manager, Just Eat
The cycle looked like this: Learn - Practice - Feedback - Retry.
Dave delivered the workshop. Skylar kept it going for 10 days after.
“Participants are internalising these frameworks faster than I’ve seen in past workshops. They’re not just hearing it - they’re doing it enough times that it’s becoming automatic.”
- Dave, Sales Trainer
What happened
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Reps trained | 69 |
| Total roleplays completed | 360+ |
| Total practice time | 5,400 minutes |
| Reps exceeding practice target | 39.5% |
Nobody was forced to do extra practice. 4 in 10 reps went beyond the target on their own - evenings, weekends, unprompted. Emily started getting messages from reps asking how to climb the leaderboard.
“There were people today asking me, ‘What’s the scoring system? How do I make sure I’m in the top three?‘”
- Emily, Head of Sales, Just Eat
What happened after everyone went home
Ask any sales trainer what happens after a two-day workshop. They’ll tell you the same thing - there’s a buzz for a week, then it fades. Reps go back to what’s comfortable. By month two, it’s like the training never happened.
That’s the forgetting curve. It kills most programmes.
This one went the other way. Scores didn’t peak on day two and fade. They climbed across the full 10-day practice window. The team finished 17% higher than where they were at the end of the workshop itself.
| Skill area | Improvement |
|---|---|
| Overall (all skills) | 33.9% |
| Active Listening | 46.6% |
| Pitching | 44.1% |
| Discovery | 27.1% |
The reps who committed hardest
The top 25% of improvers doubled their active listening scores. Not “got a bit better.” Doubled.
Pitching improved 89.9%. Discovery, 59.3%. Average across all skills: 68.9%.
Some of those reps started the programme barely asking any questions. Ten days later they were running conversations their managers would have struggled with.
Spotlight: one rep, ten days apart
One rep. Same scenario - a restaurant partner dealing with driver fraud and lost revenue. Day 1 versus Day 10.
Day 1 - Polite but transactional:
“Yeah. There’s quite a few issues there. Driver issues, no support… is that correct?”
They heard the problem. They jumped straight to fixing it. Premature pivot. Surface-level listening. The partner never felt understood.
Day 10 - Trusted advisor:
“That sounds honestly exhausting. How did that affect your confidence running the restaurant day-to-day?”
Same rep. Same trigger. Completely different conversation. Empathy first. Earns the right to ask the hard commercial questions. Unlocks concrete profit and volume targets.
Active listening improvement for this rep: +23%.
What comes next
The two-day workshop gave every rep a measured starting point. The partnership model will now run ongoing:
- New hire onboarding - baseline from week 1, tracked to week 12
- Weekly skill checks - managers see exactly who’s ready and who needs help
- Targeted turnaround - struggling reps get focused sessions, most improve within 2 weeks
- Promotion readiness - prove you can handle complex scenarios before you move up
“If we get that right and we really do understand our customers better, the longevity of that partner on the platform is going to be a lot stronger.”
- Emily, Head of Sales, Just Eat
Dave’s frameworks live inside Skylar. His expertise scales beyond the room - available to every rep, every day. And as reps keep practising, the data keeps building. New gaps surface. Lagging skills get flagged before they become lagging results. Each one is a reason to bring Dave back in - not because someone decided it was time for a refresher. But because it will make a difference to the business.
“For the first time, we can get them learning and building the muscle… they’re not afraid to make mistakes. And that’s a fundamental of learning.”
- Dave, Sales Trainer, It’s Not What You Think
