How linking key applications brought about a 17% increase in sales

At a glance

• Sales revenue attributable to sales team grew by 17% per month
• 92% of salespeople reported feeling more prepared, confident and happier at work
• 87% of new leads contacted within 23 minutes

The situation

Heavily reliant upon the performance of their 30-plus team of salespeople, ManuCo’s profits had suffered following a quarter within which this department’s performance had diminished. The company contacted ROCK and requested that we review their models and procedures to determine how a digital transformation strategy could be used to improve their sales team’s performance.

ROCK interviewed various members of ManuCo’s sales team, as well as senior stakeholders, to learn more about the procedures utilised within the team, how individual performance was managed/maintained and organisational culture.

As a result of our investigations, ROCK discovered that a variety of key metrics concerning the performance of individual salespeople were, whilst available, often overlooked by various assessors. Further inquiries revealed that sales managers were unaware of the fact that these metrics – including, for example, average call time, number of emails sent per day etc. – were recorded or where the relevant data could be located.

Additionally, ROCK reviewed the client’s digital presence noting that, whilst designed to drive direct sales, their website’s performance differed greatly across devices and had consistently low loading times. This, ROCK concluded, placed ManuCo’s sales team under unnecessary additional pressure. 

Recommendations

• Use APIs to feed all salient metrics concerning employee and team performance into one single dashboard
• Introduce automation as a means of distributing leads amongst sales team
• Enhance website performance to develop an additional revenue stream

Outcomes

Implementing improved reporting frameworks concerning both individual members of and the company’s sales team as a whole, ManuCo were more able to identify the unique challenges their sales team faced and address them. Management were also better placed to provide constructive and objective feedback to help individual salespeople improve their performance. These changes, when combined, saw ManuCo’s sales team generate 17% more revenue per month – a significant improvement on not just the prior quarter that had prompted action, but also this department’s performance throughout the previous year.

Improving feedback and performance review mechanisms has also generated significant positive feedback from sales personnel. When combined with new software that assigned leads more effectively and a website producing sales equivalent to 14% of those generated by the team themselves, these changes resulted in 92% of salespeople reporting that they felt significantly more prepared, confident and happy at work.

*We value our clients and their right to a confidential consultation. While the name has been altered, the results are real.