With the English club 10 points clear of second-placed Glasgow Warriors, they need only a point to qualify for the last eight, either from a trip to Glasgow Warriors on January 11 or their home game against La Rochelle a week later.

“The players still feel they are growing as a team and that there is more to come from them,” Baxter told the Exeter website after their 35-10 home drubbing of Sale Sharks on Sunday. “As a group, they all feel there is a bit more to grow in terms of what we can achieve together.

"A lot of what we did today – and the mistakes we made at times – was down to the players showing that little bit of desperation to do well, rather than Sale really causing us any major issues.

“Sometimes being that desperate doesn’t bring the best out of us. However, I’d much rather have that as a work-on – as opposed to us not committing flat out physically to the game. I know when we commit flat out physically, we don’t tend to lose many games of rugby.”

Baxter was delighted that his side had taken on board the lessons from last year’s Heineken Champions Cup back-to-backs, when they lost at home to Gloucester Rugby before winning the return.

“I’ve just given the players great credit for this,” he said. “We started this week talking about how we weren’t going to run away from any of the tough decisions or the tough chats we were going to have around this game.

“A lot of the guys experienced the double-header against Gloucester last season, where we lost the first game, made nine changes and went up to Gloucester the next week and won.

“Gloucester probably thought they had done the hard part by coming here and winning that day, so we knew what to expect in that sense.

“Sale this week made a similar amount of changes like we did, so it was important we got the message into the guys that we couldn’t have any hint of complacency or that we had done the hard part by going to Sale and winning last weekend.”

Exeter Chiefs director of rugby Rob Baxter has warned that “there is more to come” from the runaway Heineken Champions Cup Pool 2 leaders as they close in on only a second ever quarter-final place in Europe’s elite club competition.