Sales Training Success: Relocation Services Company cuts time from new hire to first sale by 19 months and greatly increases transaction size.
Business Problem
The VP of Sales for a relocation services company (name withheld by request) faced the challenge of increasing revenue without adding salespeople.
An analysis of the company’s sales environment yielded the following barriers to achieving its goal:
- Salespeople were calling low level contacts and had trouble relating to executives.
- Salespeople had difficulty establishing differentiators versus competitors.
- Salespeople were working on unqualified opportunities.
- Forecasting was based upon the opinions of salespeople as to what was qualified and when opportunities would close.
- The average time to a new hire’s first sale was 24 months (two years).
- Their win rate on RFPs wired by competitors was below five percent.
Improve sales and revenue performance through the introduction of a consistent, repeatable sales process.
The CustomerCentric Selling® Solution
After evaluating CustomerCentric Selling® at a public workshop, the decision was made to train the staff. The VP of Sales now has the following capabilities:
- Prior to making calls, salespeople are provided with menus of potential business goals for each executive title and learned how to help buyers share goals.
- After sharing a goal, salespeople utilize questioning templates specific to title and business goal with diagnostic questions designed to develop the need for their capabilities, including differentiators.
- After making calls, salespeople document calls in letters to prospects containing defined milestones so managers now participate in the qualify/disqualify decision.
- After getting consensus from committees, sequences of events are negotiated with prospects defining the steps needed to make a recommendation and a tentative decision date.
- Upon joining, new hires attend CustomerCentric Selling® workshops to learn how to execute questioning templates so they can make executive calls within weeks of being hired.
- When receiving unsolicited RFPs, salespeople now ask for interviews with key players within the organization as a pre-requisite to providing their response.
The results achieved from implementing the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology:
- Revenues for the first quarter of the year vs. previous year went up 83% with the same number of salespeople.
- The company’s win rate on opportunities has increased from 18% to 37%.
- Average transaction size has increased from $30K to over $70K.
- The average time for new hires’ first sales has decreased from 24 to 5 months.
- The win rate on unsolicited RFPs the company responds to has improved to 50%.
Based upon the ability for managers to disqualify low probability items from the pipeline, the company is now using the sales forecast to project EBIT and to make decisions on hiring additional operations staff.
If you have questions about this client, please contact John Holland at jholland@customercentric.com.
Client Benefits:
- Revenues increased 83%
- Opportunity win rate increased from 18% to 37%
- Transaction size increased from $30K to over $70K
- Time from hire to first sale was cut by 19 months
- Win rate on unsolicited RFPs improved to 50%
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® was named as one of Top Sales Training Methodology Companies for 2009 and also topped Selling Power’s Top Ten Sales Process Companies list in the June 2009 issue. 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.