Our Client is one of Canada’s leading national communications providers, delivering phone, cable tv, internet and network services to residential customers and businesses in North America. They realized the importance of evolving from a service organization that maintains existing customers to a sales organization that provides excellent customer service and proactively identifies and realizes new sales opportunities.
Increasing the “face-time” of the sales force with existing customers.
Proactively identifying and implementing new sales opportunities.
Installing a Sales Management Operating System (MOS) with Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
Changing the sales culture of just being a service oriented department to a proactive sales organization.
Promoting competitiveness, growing revenues and managing sales costs.
Assessment Findings
Telecommunications Business Sales Behavior Assessment
Telecommunications Business Sales Available Time Assessment
Sales Representative roles and activities were not clear (some believed that their work is to stay at the office and manage accounts).
Not all Sales Representatives plan out their work day/week.
Sales Representatives had not developed a list of potential customers to grow their customer base.
Sales Representatives spent on average about 80% of their time at their office, doing administrative activities or following-up on accounts versus active selling and growing their business.
Ineffective and non-standardized operating procedures between the Sales Representatives and their assistants created confusion with other areas like Customer Service, and even with customers, resulting in lost sales opportunities.
PVA's Response
Training and development of the Sales Representatives with regards to their roles and responsibilities, their active selling skills, and their behaviors based on a more proactive selling profile.
Changed the focus of the Sales Representatives from “any kind of customer contact” to proactive customer contacts.
Coached the Sales Representatives to develop action plans based on targeted markets or other sales opportunities with their customers.
Enhanced the communication between the Sales Representatives and their Sales Managers to include sales objectives along with the appropriate levels of follow-up.
Developed and implemented a consistent and proactive contact strategy for the Sales Representatives customer base.
Developed and implemented a Sales Management Operating System (MOS) to effectively establish selling plans for all the Sales Representatives and enhance the selling process thereby increasing revenues.
Measured attainment to “customers met” over a pre-determined cycle of weeks.
Designed and installed planning and review meetings to understand potential client situations and generate actions to meet contact strategy objectives.
The Results
Hover over graphs for more information
Some significant results obtained by our Client included:
Improved proactive contact mix by 34%.
Hours worked per number of sales reduced by 15%.
Average proactive number of contacts per week went from 244 to 498.
Improvement in Supervisory Activities
Telecommunications Business Sales Supervisory Activities
PRE-PROJECT
3%1%71%3%22%
POST-PROJECT
40%4%36%10%10%
Active Supervision
Training
Administration
Travel Time
Available
Improvement in Business Sales and Service
Telecommunications Business Sales Total Number of Contacts (Calls, Emails, Meetings)
Telecommunications Business Sales: Hours Worked / Number of Sales
Long Term Work Continuation
A Client Coordinator was trained and certified during the PVA engagement.
A quarterly audit program of the new Management Operating System was developed for the Coordinator.
PVA conducted audits over 18 months to ensure compliance to the continued utilization of the Management Operating Systems.
These Audits resulted in recommendations and action plans to further identify additional opportunities for improving operations.
A decision was made in early 2010 to work with PVA in our sales call centre and store operations. Our goal was to identify opportunities to enhance customer service, to improve efficiency and to introduce a management operation system which puts rigor into how we manage the business, coach our people, and improve overall results. I have been very pleased with the outcome of this engagement. By engaging our workforce to identify opportunities to improve the business, developing metrics to manage results, and providing our management team with better skills and metrics to lead their team and drive results we have achieved the desired outcomes and have processes in place to ensure sustainment of this initiative.
