Case Studies
Turning Farmers Into Hunters
SITUATION: Mid-size market research firm was experiencing stagnant growth in its core markets and had failed to bring in any new business in over two years. They had a strong new product pipeline, but had no outlets to bring those products to market.
SOLUTION: By doing a complete assessment of the sales department, we identified that the sales people were not "hunters" but rather "farmers". They were very good at maintaining accounts but not growing them; furthermore, the company DNA did not encourage aggressive prospecting and relied heavily on a few peer relationships. Parcus retrained the sales force, replaced the bottom 30% of producers, put a sales process and compensation plan in place that rewarded new account acquisition and profiled their "ideal" customers to identify best prospects for new products.
RESULTS: Within 2 quarters, new account acquisition was up 22%, the pipeline grew by 47% and the company was on track to realize 16% increase in net revenue for their fiscal year!
Familiarity Breeds Content
SITUATION: Capital equipment distributor facing a mature market in a shrinking industry. Offerings were becoming more and more commoditized, creating downward pressures on prices and margins. The sales force clearly was not doing a good job differentiating its offerings. Furthermore, the company was competing in a very large geographical territory with limited personnel. Too many good prospects went unnoticed as the reps chased after accounts that were familiar but not necessarily profitable.
SOLUTION: Parcus did a complete account segmentation to identify best prospects based on quantifiable data. We then proceeded to map these prospects across all the territories to identify high value clusters and design sales plans based on where the best opportunities existed, and not where the sales reps felt more "safe". Further, we trained the sales reps on our consultative sales model and accompanied them on many sales calls to ensure adaption of the new model.
RESULTS: Company rebounded from their downward spiral and actually experienced a 7% revenue growth amidst the worst recession in 30 years. New accounts were up 60% with 74 new logos being added to their sales roster.