Smart Insights Case Study
The Client
Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited
Website: https://www.smartinsights.com
The Project Objective
Due to the exceptional growth of the company, Smart Insights wanted to ensure they had an effective induction programme for new sales people and a long-term sales training programme in place to support them.
Smart Insights decided to opt for graduates with no previous sales experience so they would be open to ideas and be professionally trained from day one. Pareto was selected for the recruitment and initial training aspect. This worked well however the graduates needed regular coaching, motivation and support on the job to effectively implement the training, enhance their confidence and increase their win rates on opportunities. This was time intensive for the Head of Sales, a solution was needed to help support James (Head of Sales) so he could focus on another aspect of the business and take on a more strategic role.
Another main challenge for the sales team was to persuade people to move from free resources to paid membership services and to be more selective about which opportunities to focus on due to the high volume of free basic members.
The S2S Solution
Smart Insights contacted several training companies for a Sales Management course for James (Head of Sales). After an in-depth discussion Solutions2Success proposed a more comprehensive solution to help Smart Insights achieve their long-term objective.
In summary, the solution included a Sales Management open course, 1-2-1 sessions with James to define processes, support the creation of the on-boarding programme and sales training playbooks for all aspects of the sales process, onsite training with the sales team, listening to the sales team’s calls providing feedback and support. During this process additional sales strategy ideas were discussed between James and Debbie that were later implemented. This included changing the membership package offering and later calling times to focus on American businesses which proved to be highly successful.
The Benefits
- Assisted greatly in the development of Jess, helping her exceed target consistently clearing the way for expansion of the team.
- Results – a doubling of the sales team from 2-4 with current plans underway to grow to 8 sales team on the floor.
- 2 late shifts now in place which have increased our US business – e.g. Jess sales increased from 2-4k to 10-14k
- A highly effective on-boarding programme that retains and motivates new starters.
- Production of a comprehensive sales training playbook that covers all aspects of the sales process so the team can refer to this at all times so best practice and the right messaging is used by all sales people. This is constantly updated and is a valuable aid to all new and existing sales people.
Smart Insights' Comments
Smart Insights chose Solutions2Success for the project due to the comprehensiveness of the proposed solution, Debbie’s previous experience in marketing and sales whilst also working for high growth organisations. As Debbie had previously been a sales trainer at Pareto it was highly beneficial as the models used were familiar to Debbie and these could be referred to in the training when training the sales team to avoid confusion.
