Case Study
Rebuilding sales pipeline and conversion rates
Insight
We were invited into help a tech company with a wide-ranging brief to help improve sales skills and conversion rates.
They had recruited good people, and with robust sales systems in place too they had a wide range of metrics on sales performance.
But with all this investment they expected better results than they were getting.
A statement regularly repeated internally had achieved almost mythical standing: ‘We always win one in three.’ But this looked to be overstated. Our client’s revenue was a long way below a third of the size of business being awarded across the sectors in which they competed.
They wanted us to help unlock this opportunity.
Diagnosis
A case like this usually requires us to do some deep digging to find the hidden challenges within the sales process. This is where we were able to identify some broken linkages:
What we observed was that for every lead qualified in their CRM, they typically achieved one sale while two did not convert. So the ‘one in three’ mantra was correct – but it applied only to those projects captured in the CRM. There was a whole market out there they were not tapping in to.
At an operational level individual targets led to salespeople reserving major customers for themselves. This approach left them with limited time to cultivate new opportunities with these clients, but by keeping them exclusive, they ensured that they would benefit from the annual repeat orders.
Additionally, most sales activities were not centred on proactive outreach to boost sales revenues. Instead, the business primarily relied on incoming leads from marketing campaigns or repeat orders from existing customers.
By listening to client calls we could identify that the sales team were extraordinarily good at navigating their own catalogue and pricing structures to provide enquirers with fast and accurate quotes. However, they weren’t using the same conversation to upsell to better quality or higher margin products, to increase the volume ordered or to cross-sell complementary products to enhance the order.
At the same time, we also identified that there was an opportunity to upsell to existing large clients. They rarely received proactive calls from their salespeople to build relationships or explore opportunities for providing additional products. As a result, the sales team was primarily acting as order takers rather than creators of new sales opportunities.
Solution
The solutions we proposed were all about targeting: How the client assessed full market potential rather than the bids they heard about on the grapevine. Then how they translated this into meaningful targets for the sales team where celebration and bonus payments lined up with the business plan.
At the same time, we helped model the actual potential size of the total market they had available to them, which meant strategies for tapping into this potential could be devised. Outbound business development was created which contained targets and commission that reflected new sales success, upselling and cross-selling.
We trained them to explore with customers and enquirers what they were trying to achieve and to ask curious questions about their event. What impact did they want to create and how important was it to them or their business strategy?
That enabled the team to offer additional products or an enhanced range to the customer that met their needs and also provided for increase revenues and profit.
Existing clients were allocated a specific cadence of calls and training was provided to enable the team to have confident, wide-ranging conversations with their contacts, to identify other sales opportunities and value-added services.
Outcome
The client team quickly realised that there was more market opportunity to go for than had previously been assumed. With our help the team had a market plan that was much more clearly focused than had previously been the case.
Their sales team resource was targeted on the big opportunities they really needed to win, and the leadership team were happy to pay sales bonuses, knowing they were driving business success.
Over the course of 3 months this increased the overall average order value by 16%, the profit by significantly more, and the extra revenue gained from proactively engaging with existing clients increased three-fold.
Monies spent on commission remained the same, but were now being used to recognise actual sales improvement and success!
