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Sales Training Success: CustomerCentric Selling® helps L-3’s sales channel achieve an astonishing 140% of YTD quota by mid-year.

Key Player
Director of Sales

Goals
Russ Camacho, Director of Sales for L-3 Communications Infrared Products, formerly Raytheon Commercial Infrared (RCI) and a division of L-3 Communications, understood that his sales organization had some sales challenges when he reached out to Gary Walker, co-founder of CustomerCentric Selling®. The primary goal of Camacho and his management team was to improve corporate and channel sales performance through the implementation of a sales process that represented the best sales practices of the organization.

Current Situation
The challenges they faced in achieving this goal were:

  • Each reseller had their ‘own’ sales process, making it difficult for territory managers to provide the skill and opportunity coaching necessary to upgrade their selling skills and sales effectiveness.
  • In many cases, the reseller’s sales people spent a great deal of time selling to a single, sometimes low-level, individual who didn’t have the power to make a purchase decision.
  • The majority of sales people were comfortable talking about and showing the features of the Thermal-Eye products, but often neglected talking about how the product could be used to cost effectively achieve operational and safety goals and the associated value.
  • The lack of a consistent sales process made it very difficult to prepare an accurate sales forecast, which in turn made it difficult to plan manufacturing production.

Capabilities Needed
After identifying the sales challenges, the capabilities that Camacho said they needed were:

  • A consistent, repeatable sales process that: resellers can be taught to execute; territory managers can monitor, coach and inspect; and that represents L-3’s most effective, best sales practices
  • The ability to leverage any point of entry to obtain access to other executives who will be directly impacted by the selection and use of Thermal-Eye product capabilities, in order to create a sense of urgency and create additional value to the organization.
  • Sales tools/questioning templates that combine application and product usage knowledge by job title, that allow sales people to converse and diagnose an executives’ operational and safety issues with a bias toward the capabilities found in the Thermal-Eye products.
  • A consistent pipeline grading system that allowed management to prepare a sales forecast and calculate the probability of closing the sale based on progress through the new sales process.

CustomerCentric Selling® provided L-3 Communications Infrared Products with these capabilities. After conducting a customized workshop with selected resellers, territory managers and vertical market managers, Gary Walker worked with Camacho to determine the results of his sales process implementation initiative detailed on the following page.

When asked to comment on the improved performance,

“The combination of the right management team, armed with and consistently using the CustomerCentric Selling® sales process is enormously powerful for driving top line results. For all the members of my team, this is becoming absolutely integral to how we manage our sales channel how we sell. It’s how we drive this train, and it works.”Camacho said

“Since CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS), we have some sales people reporting at 143% of quota, worldwide, even with shortfalls in the international channel, which is their new focus since they now have their domestic business humming. Feel free to refer our success with our CCS implementation to any of your students or prospects. And I also want you to know, that as powerful as Solution Selling was, this CCS (methodology) has it absolutely nailed infinitely better, in subtle but incredibly important ways. Thank God we got rid of the dreaded 9-boxes! This one works.”-Russ Camacho,
Director Sales L-3 Communications Infrared Products

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Customer Closeup
L-3 Communications Infrared Products is a Dallas-based division of L-3 Communications, a publicly traded company with an international customer base. L-3 Infrared Products is a leading designer and manufacturer of commercial thermal imaging cameras and modules that are used by ground forces and urban tactical teams in support of public safety and homeland security efforts.

More information on L-3 Communications Infrared Products can be found at www.thermal-eye.com

If you have questions about this client, please contact Gary Walker at gwalker@customercentric.com.

Results:

  • Improved 30-day forecast accuracy from 50% to 95%
  • Improved 60-day forecast accuracy from non-existent to 82%
  • Increased sales performance of the total channel by 140% of YTD quota by mid-year
  • Increased number of resellers who exceeded their YTD sales quotas from seven at the end of the first quarter to 15 by the end of the second quarter
  • In January, one out of five domestic regions achieved quota. By March, two out of five regions exceeded YTD quota, and by June, all five regions are exceeding YTD quota, with strong backlog and even stronger pipelines.

About CustomerCentric Selling®
CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS®) is a proven methodology for predictably improving revenue growth and sales performance. Founded in 2002, CCS® helps clients worldwide to implement repeatable, auditable and scalable sales processes that, when combined with Sales Ready Messaging®, guides marketing and sales to have meaningful conversations with customers and prospects. This results in winning high-value deals, retaining and growing client relationships and improving the predictability and accuracy of sales forecasts.

CustomerCentric Selling® is regularly named to the Top Sales Training Companies list. Clients such as Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Business Objects, Rockwell Automation, EMC and Raython have deployed CCS® worldwide. For more information, vist www.customercentric.com, or call Jill Perez at 800.993.1228, ext.706.