CASE-STUDY 1: 3-MONTH PAYBACK FOR CLIENT
A Latin-American subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company found that, although opportunities were going through the sales pipeline, a very high number of bids were being lost right at the end of the process.
This is the story of a certain LatAm subsidiary of a well-known Fortune 500 company which was losing an unacceptable number of bids right at the last minute.
Each bid was large in value and hence expensive to prepare and manage through the sales/bid process. This was causing significant issues for the business by seriously impacting on profitability.
New Country manager
The business had brought in a new Country Manager to turn the situation around.
Investigations confirmed that the company’s rigorous process for ensuring that each bid is of the highest quality was working well, and that the bids were indeed of a good quality
This company is world-renowned for the quality of its training programs, yet, prior to seeing the results of the Fit-4 assessment, the Learning & Development team had determined they should invest even more in negotiating and closing skills.
However, the situation changed as a result of deploying the Fit-4 assessment test which is sales-role specific and measures:
- behaviour;
- critical reasoning;
- functional job skills; and
- motivators.
These are all criteria specifically relevant to the role being assessed. The Fit-4 test compares the results of each individual against a pre-configured High Performer benchmark for that role – in this case the role of Sales Account Manager.
People in this role typically need to be able to:
- proactively identify customer needs;
- based on customer benefit analysis;
- deploy strong engagement skills;
- feel comfortable working with some of the main board; and
- sell ‘need amortization’/ROI (return on investment).
The test discovered that although the salespeople had many strong skills there was a major problem with a lack of Critical Reasoning skills within the team. This previously unidentified skills gap was proving to be a major negative in terms of winning business because the bids developed by the organisation are quite complex in their ROI analysis and require complex final round financial discussions and negotiations.
With Critical Reasoning levels so low, the sales people were being easily outmanoeuvred by their competitors and ‘blindsided’ by even quite reasonable questions from the customer.
This inability to hold their own in such discussions could also easily account for the fact that a typical sales team member also exhibited low Sales Confidence and poor Listening behaviours as well.
The organisation was able to get a long way down the bid process thanks to its position as the ‘big brand’ and so the customer was using the organisation’s bids as benchmarks for ‘beating up’ alternative suppliers.
Solution
To alleviate the problem and as an immediate fix, the company created a ‘buddy system’ with Finance, who now accompany the sales people to all significant customer meetings.
The result? Revenue is moving up again – significantly!
April 2010 – the results of the Fit-4 test were presented to the client.
May 2010 – the buddy system was put in place and the financial development needs had been identified.
July 2010 – revenue and profit had increased to a point where ALL costs (assessment & development) had been covered.
Payback – including additional training – 3 months!
Result – Fit-4 is now being introduced throughout the business for development & recruitment.
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