Case Studies | Sales Solutions
A Global Leader in Market Intelligence
International Sales VPs could not advance growth. New hires weren’t ramping quickly enough, meeting aggressive sales projections or owning their book of business. Performance measures and controls weren’t working while the VP’s were working harder than their direct reports to grow revenue today, rather than doing what they needed to do, which was focusing on tomorrow's strategic growth.
Sales failure is a leadership problem, not rep one. When leaders control only numbers over behaviors they encourage poor performance. WinThinking designed a program focused on leveraging and managing behavior, to drive desired results. Newly adopted behaviors insured that the right actions happened at the right times.
WinThinking’s sales acceleration program, “Becoming the CEO of Your Book of Business,” created the desired entrepreneurial, self-starting spirt and established critical role definition alignment, and needed accountability to turn an under-performing west coast sales office into a winning one.
The program was replicated worldwide. The company experienced an unprecedented revenue lift of 10x over previous year performance.
A Leader in Interactive Exhibit Production
An industry leader in the museum and tradeshow exhibit production space was gaining clients and design awards but losing money. WinThinking evaluated their sales teams and found them to be more order takers than sales leaders. Their approach to selling was to lower margins instead of increasing perception of value.
To insure the needed transformation from a commodity selling approach to value added one, we partnered with the COO. First, we created a strategic growth plan that would elevate him to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Second, we initiated a value focused sales development program designed to win business faster, while capturing more desirable profile margins. The result increased billing by 30% in next two quarters.
Our collaboration with the CRO revealed four hidden issues limiting profit margins. First, a poorly lead production team was slowing delivery times down, driving up company absorbed rushed shipment costs. The second critical issue we uncovered, was that the collections department extended longer payment terms than signed contracts agreed to. This was due to poor leadership in that department, plus an operating mindset that focused more on winning business than on winning profitable business, plus a lack of negotiation skills training for their collection officers. A third issue, that of low employee engagement was linked to workers not being paid on time due to limited cash flow resulting from poor collections. The forth issues was over spending on ineffective lead generation marketing.
What we saw here was that any company business acts like a dog. It has a main body and a tail. In this specific company, it's sales force and its client base were the main body of the organization, while it's production and fulfillment departments were the tail. In this company's case the tail was wagging the dog. Slower production and fulfillment cycle times (the tail) were actually lowering customer satisfaction scores of the sales team (the body) rather than supporting them.
Our integrated solution was four-fold. First, remove the underperforming third of the sales team. Second, repurpose that budget into better leader generation marketing. Third, optimize an under-utilized production floor. And forth tighten lax collections processes to pay employees on time.
All senior executives acknowledged overall poor leadership performance and accountability was the core issue holding company growth back. Our proposal was rejected. The CRO left the company with months. Client market share shrunk. Billing went from company best in previous year to worse in the following year.