Growing revenue
High Tech Co. was suffering a decline in sales productivity. The company had made a number of improvements to its sales force effectiveness, including realigning sales coverage, establishing a new compensation structure, improving recruiting and upgrading the training program. However, sales productivity remained low. Management needed to improve the situation and wanted to know what was causing poor performance and what actions it could take for quick results.
We redesigned the sales roles and the support structure.
- Improved sales productivity by 5% (Revenue / Sales Person)
- Increased available selling time from 14 hrs/week to 17.5 hrs/week
- Increased actual face-to-face selling time by 60%
- Created an opportunity to increase sales by $28 million
- Identified low utilization and low support leverage as the root causes of low sales force productivity
- Found that low utilization was driving low available selling time
- Tracked sales force activities and time spent by activity and found that the sales force was spending 24% of its time selling, and only 12% of its time in actual face-to-face selling. Sales reps were settled with administrative tasks and customer care that could otherwise be delegated to sales support staff
- Analyzed the support structure and found that it was under-sized for the job, including too few customer care staff
- Redesigned back-office processes, streamlined customer care (quoting, order entry, order follow-through, etc.) and administrative tasks (CRM data entry, lead tracking, report generation, etc.)
- Redefined sales and support roles to free up sales force available selling time
- Increased support staff by 50% and shifted low-valued added work from sales force reps to support staff, altogether less expensive
- This condition freed up sales reps time from 14 hrs/week of selling time to 17.5 hrs/week
- An additional 3.5 hours of sales rep time per week improved sale productivity by 5% and
- It created an opportunity to increase sales by $28 million
