Project Initiator:
National Sales and Marketing Manager
Assignment Period:
June 2008 – June 2009
Matthews Business Need:
Sales performance had been very consistent and growing steadily for a long period. However, we lacked a clear and tangible structure for prospecting new clients and existing client opportunities. We knew we could perform even better. Visit activity rate was too low. We also struggled to achieve unilateral discipline across the sales team to comply with our customer relationship management software system.
The Next Level Business Solution:
The Next Level volunteered to understand our business first before we actually engaged them. They invested some diagnostic time in the field and sat with me over a number of meetings to really understand where we were coming from and how their solutions could be tailored for us.
After developing some pipeline systems and associated metrics for us, they put our sales team through a whole day workshop they called The Hunting Game. It exposed us to the background of pipeline theory and briefed us on the specification of the system they designed for us. Moreover, the game took us through a dynamic Development and Learning experience, which accelerated the embedding of the system.
The Next Level assisted us thereafter, by writing the spec into our customer relationship software, modelling some aspects of our sales team productivity, providing us some useful benchmark setting and developing some account management tools, templates and systems.
The Results So Far:
We undertook an array of initiatives to drive our improvement, and it would be difficult to identify the benefit for any one . We certainly have a much greater focus on hunting nowadays and call rates to hunted and farmed accounts are always used in our sales discussions.
Our overall conversion rate from enquiry to order is 33% (as 50% of new opportunities become dead), so I would estimate we increased our conversion from around 15% to 25%, with a 20% increase in the quantity of hunted opportunities raised.