A building materials giant equips their front-line sales managers with performance coaching skills
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Goals
- Improve margins
- Build consistent sales practices
- Equip front-line sales managers with the skills and tools to drive profitable growth
Challenge
A large U.S. supplier of building products, prefabricated components and value-added services has become a one-stop shop for new residential construction, repair, and remodeling contractors. It operates in dozens of states with hundreds of locations and services its customers from strategically located distribution and manufacturing facilities.
The organization has continued to grow through a combination of internal expansion and strategic acquisitions – 34 companies in 20 years. As a result, it has lacked a unified, consistent sales management operating system. This has led to inconsistencies in its sales process and practices, and in the way new salespeople are onboarded. Without a unifying message around its value, the company faced challenges around commodity price fluctuations and was being forced to regularly defend its value to protect gross margins.
Solution
To improve margins, the company realized it needed to build consistent sales practices and equip front-line sales managers with the skills and tools to drive profitable growth. Profitable Selling came in to implement a 180-day selling and coaching initiative to address these needs.
As part of the initiative, managers participated in a coaching workshop and completed online micro-learning modules to develop new skills and adopt consistent sales and coaching processes.
The solution also included a mobile-ready resource center and a video role-playing platform that builds a reference library of real-time sales best practices for ongoing reinforcement and application. This system allows sales managers to improve the quality of every sales call while focusing on the skills that create the greatest value for customers.
Impact
Profitable Selling built measurement and evaluation methods into the coaching tool to quantify corporate, regional, and front-line sales manager performance targets. Some of the positive outcomes include new business growth, gains in customer wallet share, higher margins and improved retention of sales reps.
- Winning legions of early adopters - August 29, 2020
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