by John Archer
It seemed sensible logic. You take a large, successful national IT staffing company add 20-odd equally successful project and “solutions” companies in a booming market and watch your revenue grow. Cross selling alone will surely reap significant rewards. Right? Unfortunately not twelve months later, with the growth promised to Wall St not materializing, the staffing side was spun off to start anew.
And yet the concept was sound. There was opportunity for significant, quick growth. The staffing company had a vast number of established customers and the capabilities of the solutions companies, assimilated and grouped into various Business Units, would be sold to this market. Because the staffing Account Manager typically had free and unrestricted access to the customer premises (something that is worth its weight in gold to all sales people) critical information about the target customer could be easily gathered and prospecting meetings for the solutions groups would be easier to set up. This would decrease the sales cycle substantially and significantly improve the likelihood of winning business.
However, the endeavor failed miserably, primarily because three basic tenets of any sales program were omitted. Firstly, there was no timetable and no measures. To this day anyone would be hard pressed to critique the success of the exercise, where attempts were made and what the results were. It was all simply ad-hoc.
Secondly, the positioning was seriously flawed. The staffing sales people conveyed the message that they were now all part of a “solutions” company and then tried to win the project business themselves. Unfortunately, the customer had them firmly positioned as a staffing company and did not consider either the company or the sales person credible to move into the very different world of Project Plans and deliverables as opposed to the provision of bodies. In addition, the Solutions companies did not adequately play their part. They did not package their offerings in a way that it allowed the staffing Account Manager to position them. No one crisply conveyed which person in the customer organization should be canvassed and how this person would benefit from the services on offer.
And this was to the places they even tried. Failure to provide any form of compensation for cross selling was the third reason for the lack of success. Not only was the incumbent Account Manager of the staffing group offered nothing (at least nothing formal) for bringing in the other business units, but there was the potential that a project could actually replace a staffing opportunity thereby categorically ensuring the Account Manager would do everything necessary to subvert the opportunity.
All this could have been solved had the company employed a Corporate Vice President of Sales. Any such person worth their salt would have defined a timetable to conduct a measurable cross-selling campaign, ensured financial incentive to all groups and monitored the performance so that changes in message could be made if customers did not “buy-in”. Unfortunately, no such role was created.
However, at much the same time as the corporate effort was unraveling the enlightened President of one of the larger solutions Business Units decided to inaugurate a holistic sales plan in his own domain. His $280 million unit comprised 6 of the recently merged solutions companies and the total composition of skills and services were unclear. He recognized that if they were to have any chance of looking like an integrated unit as opposed to a “roll-up” of diverse companies he would have to package all service offerings in a consistent manner, ensure the sales force was aware of the full extent of the capabilities on offer and train these sales people to effectively sell them. To achieve this he decided to implement a proven sales methodology.
Now it is a cold fact of life that the net result of many sales methodology implementations is a sales force that has learned a couple of neat tricks – not much of a return for, potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars. To avoid this, care had to be taken to address the double challenge of ensuring (1) a complete implementation specific to the facets of the business and (2) comprehensive buy-in from the organization.
To that end, 3 critical steps were taken. Firstly, the President ensured the methodology permeated the entire Business Unit. He, personally, learned the process and demanded that core terminology was used throughout the organization. In addition to the standard 4 day class for all sales people an abridged version was relayed to consultants and Project Managers and lunchtime overviews were delivered for the benefit of all staff. Everyone was clear on what was expected of the sales force. Additionally, recognizing that many Profit Center managers had sales people, but no direct sales experience of their own, a custom sales management initiative was rolled-out. In a somewhat creative vein, these Profit Center managers could elect to receive outsourced sales management help from a central group. Finally, all forecasting had to follow consistent rules. This ensured problem groups were very visible at an early stage. For a business with an average sales cycle of upwards of 6 months this was crucial. In essence, care was taken to provide support where competence was questionable and visibility where the process was being subverted.
Secondly, all the capabilities of the company that could be considered ‘repeatable’ consulting offerings were packaged in “Toolkits” in a standard format mapped to the sales process. These Toolkits comprised information to support the entire sales cycle. They supported prospecting by giving the sales people ways to elicit interest from potential customers. In addition, they stipulated the requirements for a qualified opportunity. If the sales person could not satisfy these they would receive no support from the relevant Subject Matter Expert. However, if they could then they were guaranteed support. This resulted in a significant reduction in cost of sales because less effort was spent on unqualified opportunities and ineffective prospecting.
Thirdly, a web-based Sales Support Center was developed. This housed the Toolkits and provided the sales people with all additional information needed to do their job. It laid out the offerings grouped into logical segments, provided reference stories (sort able by industry, region and type of work), competitive information, methodology support, plus a marketing tool that enabled them to identify companies that fit their target patch. This significantly reduced the time sales people needed to find information thereby allowing more time with customers. With access to this information, sales managers could effectively target their sales people to sell certain offerings to new customers and also ensure all available offerings were promoted to their current customer base. This enabled cross selling where it had not been possible before.
Within one year of the inauguration of the program the methodology was selected for rollout across the entire enterprise. What had been a set of disparate companies was now operating as integrated, national IT SOLUTIONS COMPANY. Six months later an Internet Service Provider looking for just that paid $1.5 billion to acquire it.