I need a detailed strategy write-up that focuses on my efforts to improve sales
I need a detailed strategy write-up that focuses on my efforts to improve sales for the two regions I oversee at my current business – South West and North West.
This should consist of specifically FOUR detailed Buckets/pillars. We should put them so they mainly focus on Growth, Customer-centric, and employee engagement.
See below for a brief of the background.
I have two regions South West and North West and I have four reports. Vicky (BM for NW), Nevil (BM for SW) and CC as a Manager for PreSales SW and GD PreSales manager NW.
NW Region:
The NW is run by Vicky who is relatively new and considered by the team as being very abrupt and sometimes comes as rude to the 4 male sales managers and 2 of them are seniors and have been with the company for more than 20 years each.
They always performed according to their sales target yearly. However, they are now considered lazy and not seeing customers as they should have. The other two are relatively new and hence generate fewer sales.
The NW has NOT been performing well for three years in a row and we need a customer and employee engagement strategy to do a turnaround. (so need the four buckets here)
Moreover, with this team, we have a consulting manager who specifies our products, but he’s been slow as well.
We have added a new guy as a Business Development manager who works now on the applied products. Those products generate more opportunities for the NW team as they are higher in value, and we have a good product range but a relatively low market share. So I consider it a game changer for growth. What Can I do to help the team pick this strategy where other regions have been successful at it and bring my sales managers to change their comfort zone in selling the legacy products called DX and start engaging more in the Applied products?
Pls note that our CAGR on DX is stable but not huge but Applied has grown at 50% yoy within the group.
Vicky is now policing the team and asking them to do new things for the sake of customer-centric. For customer engagement – she came up with a weekly scheme where customers guess the football match results and the winners get breakfast from the sales manager.
Personally, I’m not happy with this scheme as it involves picture taking which some of these sales managers don’t like it. But I need different ideas that can compete/better than this one.
Also the Pre-sales team is not performing very well and the quotes and telephone answering has been weak. This weakness has now been put against their KPI and we are monitoring it closely. We also asked the team to come back to the office instead of working from home. I need a project that can improve this scheme.
SW:
Contrastingly the South West have Nevil who has just been promoted and similarly has 4 sales managers. But they have been performing better than NW. In fact their sales have increased by 40% than LY and are now setting a new record. This is on the back of their product diversification with Applied products.
Also, their Pre Sales Team (PST) is performing and producing accurate quotes and bigger values.
They have to feel for the market and they entertain their customer maybe better.
Overall we need to motivate the team and set accountability plus different strategies.
Since I joined as their Leader I have been monitoring and trying to see what new strategies that keep them going as the SW has increased their sales by and spending my time 60% NW 40% SW.
I need these four buckets /strategies to be shown.
Customer Centric and Employee Engagement
Also:
South West/NW
§ Leverage brands (Good brand which is known internationally)
§ People, hire and retain the best talent. (Do I need one more salesperson?)
§ Engineering and technical support to customers & consultants
§ Train our staff to be the best and most trusted consultants
§ Go to market strategy
Specific to NW:
Improve poor sales strategies such as
§ Price-based selling (how can we improve this as they are used to certain discounts?)
§ Increase Visits (already on the case but is not working with older generation but with the KPI and bonus scheme in place we may see this moving to that direction)
§ Presales team improve level quote and turnaround quality vs quantity (how can do this)
§ We quote everyone and need to priorities.
§ Etc (add)
Also, culture change is required
• Need to ask staff to come to the office regularly – (already done that just recently)
• Improve Project Intel (working on this)
• Etc
• More Customer engaging events (Plus the above, we do sporting events golfing/factory visits etc Any other ideas would be appreciated?)
Last but not least – I have a fair amount of resistance from the team with some talking to my line manager and taking approvals without referring to me. Since he knows them well before I joined the business. We need to have some clutch on this and they should trust me.