Results

ATS Arrow is a Registered Training Organisation. We deliver government-funded training to clients’ employees in a large variety of blue chip companies.

We approached Ballistix for assistance with our sales process. With operations over three mainland states and a highly competitive industry, we wanted a more measured way to manage our sales process.

Ballistix soon helped us to recognise that the solution required was more complex than just adding a new sales coordinator. To remain ahead of the game we needed:

• A formal approach to sales management;
• A new product development process that enabled us to systematically design and deliver new, innovative training courses and;
• a more efficient way of scheduling our trainers’ valuable time.

SALES

As typical to all Ballistix projects, we added a centralised sales coordinator to coordinate all sales opportunities within Victoria and South Australia and a management information system to maintain this process.

We also changed our sales process to a more consultative process, where our sales consultants completed a training audit with prospects to identify key training gaps as well as opportunities for government-funded training.

Other changes included:

• The creation of a whitepaper
• An excel-based eligibility calculator for the various government-funded training initiatives
• A report template that automated the creation of client audit outcomes

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The development of new courses is important for our organisation. But like most organisations
caught in the daily demands of operations, we hadn’t always given the development of new courses
the attention it deserved.

Ballistix’s solution was to assign a NPD Coordinator whose responsibilities were to:

• ensure that existing courses were current and compliant;
• maintain a pipeline of new courses (for new and existing markets) and;
• provide assistance with tenders.

Thanks to this new process it is no longer possible to neglect new product development in favour of more operational tasks — our NPD Coordinator won’t allow it! This has enabled us to take new training products to the market much faster and with a lot less last minute stress.

PRODUCTION (TRAINERS)

The last piece of the puzzle was the formalisation of production scheduling.

For us production is our trainers’ time. The more time they can spend out in the field training, the better the outcome for ATS Arrow.

Trainers’ diaries were put under the stewardship of customer support whose responsibility
was to schedule training according to the greatest contribution on each trainer’s finite capacity.

To aid this goal, a formal scheduling tool was built that allowed the utilisation of each trainer to be tracked, taking into account the type of training and travel time required from appointment to appointment.

The benefits were immediate. Trainer productivity increased without an undue increase in the total number of hours worked.

THE VERDICT

Although it will take us much more time than expected to really see the benefit of these new systems — particularly in sales— we are seeing positive signs.

We now have a much more measurable and considered way to approach things. We can effective measure what is working, what isn’t, and why!

Throughout, we have been impressed with Ballistix’s unwavering commitment. We found them supportive and genuinely interested in the success of our business.

What caught us by surprise most was the serious and unwavering commitment required by our entire management team to make it all work. Anything less and you risk losing the truly remarkable steps forwards this process can offer you.

Kind regards,

MACALA ASH

Managing Director
ATS Arrow

Without hesitation, I would recommend Ballistix to any business, small or large, who wants to increase sales and systemise workflow.

Despite the geographical barrier – (Ballistix are in Queensland and we are in Perth), Ballistix held our hand through every stage and have made what at the beginning seemed impossible, achievable.

We are a small bookkeeping and accounting practice used to time billing. We have moved to project based fees under the guidance of Ballistix. Our existing client base embraced the new billing system which allows them to manage their cash flow.

Our clients can liaise with us when required without the fear of additional fees and I would add that our clients don’t abuse this – they are as busy as we are and only contact us when the need arises. Systems were then tailored specific to our organisation to manage the workflow freeing up the capacity to embark on a marketing campaign (designed by Ballistix) and the ability to take on new clients.

I can’t speak highly enough of them and consider the money we spent with them to be the best investment I have made.

 

ROSIE DAVIDSON

CEO | Bas-Sol

Please find detailed below some specific points about the nature of our business, as well as an outline of the scope of work you conducted on our behalf and the experience we had dealing with you and the team at Ballistix.

CASF’s core business is the distribution of DuPont in Australia. As the distributor of Corian, we add value by eliminating friction between DuPont and the end users of Corian. Essentially we are responsible for generating demand for the product amongst end users, then ensuring we have timely and adequate supply to meet that demand.

Our initial project with Ballistix was to ensure we had a sales process that was scalable once implemented. The re-engineering project sonsisted of

• Designing the optimal sales process
• Developing management infrastructure to report and measure sales performance
• A structured and manageable promotional strategy
• A structured opportunity management process
• A structured communications program
• Recruit and train sales support personnel
• Project reviews

The results of the project were such that we identified our current constraint was not in fact in our sales process, but in supply (our fabricator network). We have been able to shift our focus to develop a plan to fix this constraint, and begin to move the constraint to our sales process.

Our dealings with the team at Ballistix was very good. We found all staff most helpful andvery responsive to our needs. The focus of all concerned was directed to ensuring we achieved the necessary goals within the timeline outline in the project plan.

Best Regards,

CRAIG SMITH

Managing Director

At the start of this interview, Marc Cohen discloses that he has a medical condition — one that results in him having a visceral aversion to consultants!

Nonetheless, Marc is here to tell the story of his first 18 months, implementing SPE. He explains why he did it, the impact on his organization and his experiences working with us here at Ballistix.

It’s an interesting story. We discuss one particular division of Davcor (EKA) and Marc relates how:

• He reduced his field sales team from 3 salespeople to zero
• His opportunity pipeline exploded in size
• Sales increased by 20% — with more good news in store as a number of high-probability opportunities move towards closure
• His policy of giving rations to the strong has resulted in the rapid growth of a dynamic inside-sales team (where previously, there was none)

Davcor is a $30m distributor of a range of physical security products, from locks and keys, though to commercial access-control systems. Davcor’s EKA division distributes an access-control system that delivers the benefits of traditional systems to mobile assets (shipping containers, trucks, and gates).

In the interview, Marc mentions a brochure that’s contained in the pre-approach package that’s used to initiate approaches to potential clients. You can pay-through that brochure here.

The day Ballistix Managing Director Justin Roff Marsh walked into the offices of Drake International, he could see immediately that its sales force was operating at below optimum.

In reality, Drake was suffering from two core problems.

Firstly, chronic multi-tasking of the sales force which gave the perception of activity, but with no measurable increase in new business.

Secondly, Drake lacked the ability to communicate with potential clients at an executive level. This was a result of Drakes’ loss of reputation as leaders in recruitment. As a consequence of this market perception, Drake was stuck pitching to middle and lower management clients almost exclusively.

Rick Whitman is one of two Drake project managers who worked closely with Ballistix to apply a two-pronged solution to the problem. Over a nine month period Ballistix worked with Drake to restructure the sales process and develop new practices and a new methodology for the sales team.

“We implemented the Ballistix sales process for our internal sales team to increase the return on our large investment in sales people and gain greater control of their activities”, says Rick.

“The first phase was to re-assign administrative and lower-leverage jobs to the sales coordinators”, he adds. “This meant employing a team of eight sales coordinators who were responsible for setting 240 sales appointments a week”.

According to Rick, the key issues revolved around changing the attitude and behaviours of the sales team – they had to learn to release non-core sales activities to the sales coordinators.

“A good example of this is appointment making and post-call follow up – freeing the sales team by handing over their diary management allowed them to focus on selling and freed their time for face to face contact with clients”.

In fact, the Ballistix model advocates a ‘five appointments a day, five days a week’ salesperson productivity level, achieved by giving the responsibility for diary management and administration tasks to a sales coordinator.

“Any resistance soon dissipated when sales people saw twenty new appointments a week in their diaries with no cold-calling involved – they were able to use the Ballistix sales process to generate new business from these leads, which is what having face to face time creates”, he says.

Ballistix also built specific management information software for Drake that provided key information and statistics about the effectiveness of campaigns and the productivity of the sales team.

The Ballistix team worked closely with Drake management, challenging them to identify their core business offering and subsequent ‘manifesto’. This resulted in the development of the Drake Workforce Optimisation approach, a methodology that encompassed the essence of Drake’s product offering.

This was incorporated into the process and promoted via seminars, as Rick Whitman explains;

“At the same time we implemented the new sales process, we also launched an events program based around the Drake Workforce Optimisation approach. We invited C-level executives to attend breakfast seminars which we hosted and used as a unique selling platform, generating leads for our sales coordinators to follow”.

This program re-positioned Drake and gave relevance back to the business at an executive level.

“This allowed us to engage with senior level management and position ourselves as credible leaders in our field, who were capable of servicing high end markets, a position we had lost in previous years. The value of this market perception is immeasurable”, says Rick.

“By re-positioning ourselves as executive leaders we have increased our actual revenues by taking on higher paid commissions. We were also able to shine a light on our existing sales team – by taking back control of the sales process and using organised systems to measure the actual productivity of our team, we were able to address issues as they came up. It made communication straightforward and really boosted morale”, he adds.

“Average sales went from eight to nineteen a week within a few months – we are achieving high sales revenues and activities and importantly, high individual productivity from our sales team”.

According to Justin Roff-Marsh, it’s important to recognise and work with individual strengths. “Ballistix software allows management to see better than ever which sales people are good at selling new business and which are better as servicing existing accounts”, he says.

The Ballistix project has not only given Drake a new, more robust sales process but a process for consistently generating leads to funnel into the sales process with a seminar based marketing program.

This ‘buffer’ of leads is fundamental to the Ballistix sales process model as it provides a qualified ‘list’ of prospects to be scheduled into the salespeople’s diaries.

Based on his experience with the project, Rick feels that any business that has a team involved in business to business selling would benefit from adapting the Ballistix approach.

“In fact”, he adds, “it’s hard to think of a business that wouldn’t benefit”.

After the lunch with Justin, I walked away thinking “you know what…that guy’s onto something!” we re-examined our priorities and started to take steps towards freeing our sales people to do what they do best, sell…and got instant results!

Our business became busier because our salesperson was seeing more people! We were doing more proposals and finally, the company was managing the relationship with the customer – not the salesperson.

Orders are now increasing and we have a focus – each day each of us understands what we’re doing and there’s no time wasted talking through process over and over again. We now get proposals out in a day not a week and we control margins and effort not the salesperson. We are tackling more complex tasks that they never would have gotten to before and it’s paying off in stock movement.

Thanks Justin for your insights and I will keep in touch!

Yours sincerely,

J.D. (JOE) TRIMBOLI

General Manager – Asia-Pacific
ecoBright® energy solutions Limited

EPR is a well-established (1992) company specialising in enabling executives and professionals to achieve exceptional results in their career development. We pioneered this field in Australian and are the leaders in it, with offices in Melbourne and Sydney and Associates in all major cities in Australia and New Zealand.

When we engaged Ballistix at assist us in 2005, we had been experiencing a decline in enquiries over time, due in part to increased competition and more particularly to the buoyant job market for executives and professionals in recent years. Ballistix helped us to redevelop our sales process from one commencing with the offer of a free consultation to one commencing with the offer of a free booklet. Some of the major aspects of the project were:

• Redesign of our advertisements
• Development of the booklet to be offered
• Development of a sales coordination process and training on the initial sales coordinators
• Assistance with implementing a seminar-based approach for those prospective clients who would not accept an invitation to a free consultation.

Ballistix also assisted us in developing a new channel to market by making us aware of an opportunity to sponsor a booklet for professionals, with leads passed on as a results.

Once the initial work had been completed and the booklet could be offered, responses increased dramatically. Initially, we experienced an increase in enquiries of around 150%. While expenses increased and the conversion rate from enquiry to initial consultation was lower than formerly, the exercise produced a significant improvement in overall results.

Results have tapered over time, due in part to a continued tightening of the overall employment market, and, we believe, to a need at this point to refresh the appeal of our offer. We are currently making adjustments and are confident that results can again be improved.

In our journey over the past several years, Ballistix has been an important partner. We have found them professional, supportive, genuinely interested in their clients and willing to ‘go the extra mile’. A consulting firm always has the opportunity to learn with its clients, and we see Ballistix as a firm that is continually learning and committed to passing the results of that learning. We have since used their services to redevelop our website and expect to continue to work with them well into the future.

I have no hesitation in recommending Ballistix’ services and would be happy to discuss our experience with interested parties.

Sincerely,

RUSSELL JOHNSON

Managing Director
EPR International

Equinox Partners is a small executive recruitment business looking to transition from our small and specialized market base to a more broad based volume business model. Key to the strategy is to move from being account management focused to becoming a sales driven business.

The changes that we had in mind were a radical departure from what we had traditionally done and meant that the way we looking at marketing and selling our products and services had to change.

We engaged Ballistix initially to conduct a feasibility study from which we hoped to get an idea as to hope we might be able to improve the products that we were offering the market as well as the way we went about selling the product. Justin Roff-Marsh met with us for two days, and by listening to our ideas and thoughts as well as providing his own insight and experience, was able to devise a pathway forward for Equinox.

Together we engineered a Sales and Delivery process that was to be used to underpin our business. As well as the process, we put together strategies to increase our chances of getting new business and more importantly keeping it.

At that point we had the clear choice to go it alone or alternatively hire Ballistix to build on what we had devised and implement the project.

For a small business like Equinox, to implement this type of project involves a significant leap of faith as the costs are not insignificant. We decided that the Ballistix expertise was too valuable to miss out on and took steps to engage them on our implementation. This is a decision for which we have no regrets.

Rebecca Stokes was appointed our consultant and she quick built a working relationship
with both management and our new sales coordinator. Her professional approach and calm style worked well with our team and before long we had the frame work of the project working within our business. Though we took on a limited project, nothing was ever too much trouble and we certainly felt that all was done to ensure our projects success.

And it had undoubtedly been a success. In the 3 months since we implemented the project, we have visited over 100 new prospective customers and about 10% of those have trialed our service with another 20% making some level of commitment to trialing in the future. To put this into perspective, this has all been done with just one Sales Rep and one Sales Coordinator. In the previous 12 months we would not have visited 10 new prospects. We feel confident going forward that our sales will grow to reflect our sales efforts and the sales model in place means that all sales efforts are forward looking and productive.

We have found Ballistix a pleasure to work with and the results they have brought our business speak for themselves.

Regards,

JOHN CRUSE

Equinox Partners
Level 7, 51 Queen Street
MELBOURNE VIC AUSTRALIA

Hi-Heat Industries, Inc. is a small custom manufacturer of heating elements; we sell primarily to the original equipment manufacturers (OEM). We contracted with Ballistix to reengineer our sales process. A major result of the reengineering was separating the design from the sales position. Since the inception of Hi-Heat 27 years ago, sales and design were inextricably intertwined. We also created the sales coordinator’s responsibilities, making her responsible for the on-going sales contact program and reports. Ballistix customized the Business Contact Manager program and reports.

Our experience with Ballistix was absolutely great. Justin Roff-Marsh exhibited a quality we would see repeatedly in Ballistix, accommodating to our specific situation. We don’t sell through face to face sales calls. Justin adapted the sales process to fit our model. Instead of trying to convince us to change, he adapted his proposal to us. We saw this flexibility repeatedly in all our contacts with Ballistix.

The very nature of a consulting contract has the possibility of creating resistance and divisiveness, since a natural reaction to change is no. However, we were fortunate; Katrina Rowe came to work with us. She helped us embrace change instead of being resistant to it. She did this by winning our respect; she is very knowledgeable, experienced and intelligent. By being disarmingly humorous and charming; she was able to break through our resistance and help us achieve our goals.

Our results are what we anticipated: sales measurements were created, software was developed to track the measurements, sample pack and instructions were created, advertising campaign’s tracking and new product development tracking were developed.

Again, we enjoyed working with Ballistix and believe that we got a great ROI.

Sincerely,

SUSAN KNEDLER GENERAL MANAGER

DESCRIPTION OF FIRM

Intégro is a leadership development consultancy that helps transform organisational cultures
through the development of trustbased leadership. The business has two primary divisions: we distribute Inscape Publishing Inc. Behavioural profiles throughout Australia and New Zealand – the best known being the DiSC range of profiles; we are also a global leadership development consulting company.

SITUATION BEFORE BALLISTIX

Intégro has been in business for over 30 years and during this time has established a
strong client base for our profiles, and a reputation as being “the DiSC people”. In recent years our emphasis has been largely on product development within niche areas of leadership development, which has generated significant interest in our process–based methodology. We recognised that in order to accelerate the growth of the business we would require a formal sales process, with particular emphasis on opportunity management. We are a relationship–focussed business, and all of our current team were also responsible for facilitation and consulting in addition to the sales function. Struggling to follow up post–marketing activity due to the consultants’ hectic schedules, it became evident that we required a dedicated sales team to grow the business and pursue the opportunities.

THE STRATEGY DEVISED

Following our initial contact with Ballistix, our team agreed that the feasibility study
was an essential starting point to review our current sales process. A few of the key findings from this study highlighted the fact that our business model could incorporate a dedicated sales person without affecting our ability to deliver the consistency of relationship between the sales function and delivery. The other significant decision was that we needed to change our approach to marketing. In previous years our marketing was sporadic and ultimately challenging to effectively follow up leads. So incorporating a more process–based, fluid marketing approach was not only preferable to implement, but effective as well.

EXECUTION

One of the key recommendations we have is maintaining a clear understanding of your goals for the project and communicating that with Ballistix. This worked well for us, as we had been operating with a somewhat informal approach to sales management. This meant that introducing a sales “process” was new territory for the team and it took some time to gain the clarity needed regarding the benefits of being process–driven in our sales cycle. Through continuing to use open communication, and through the sales meetings, we’ve been able to find a steady rhythm that works well for our business. This includes following the Ballistix process and maintaining one of our core operating values, which requires flexibility in approach to task.

RESULTS

The addition of the sales team and the installation of the MIS have really shown us the greatest benefit. The MIS is practical and functional, as it helps us to see exactly where we are at with our opportunities. From a business management perspective, this has been one of the most valuable assets. The dedicated sales team is also working well for us by gaining us more access into our current client base. We have a number of people who purchase product from us and now that we have a team focussed solely on sales, we’re opening up a number of new doors with our existing client base.

As we are only a few months from the end of the official project with Ballistix, we have not seen a significant increase in the number of sales quite yet, not withstanding economic and cyclic influences. We are confident that the increase in appointments (up about 10 per week) and new business opportunities that we are uncovering, will continue to see us gain the growth that we are seeking. We also expect to expand this sales process model into our international organisations.

If you require any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

LAUREN AYERS

Marketing Director

Marketing Results had outgrown its craft-shop environment, impairing the ability for the firm to scale the business.

Ballistix introduced division of labour to both sales and production environments. A master scheduler was added to
plan both functions. The standard Ballistix sales management-information system was linked to the CRM in conjunction with a custom-built part-manual / part-electronic production scheduling system.

The result was that the salesperson now enjoyed twice the output for half the time spent — a 400% increase in throughput. Sales increased by 30% and, in production, on-time delivery and service quality improved significantly.

When Will Swayne, CEO of Marketing Results first met with Ballistix he was about to embark on a marketing campaign. I t soon turned out that the business’ real constraint lay in production capacity. He didn’t need to sell more: He needed to make more!

Since engaging Ballisitix Marketing Results has boosted productivity by 50 per cent, and the enhancement has been achieved in just 20 per cent of the time it typically takes.

Will explains: “We have applied TOC in many ways to a reasonably sophisticated level in our sales process. Incoming calls are now taken by a sales coordinator who has an initial chat with the prospect, sends out the company’s literature and books them in for a half-hour consultation with me. The coordinator later sends out any relevant information and follows up.”

“By taking more calls each day they can really drive lead generation, so we are maximizing a scarce resource and that relieves me of many processes. Instead of taking five hours to get a sale it takes just one hour.”

Will believes adopted properly the increase in throughput is massive.

“As a business owner you have to have the discipline to focus on the right things — your strengths. Today sales and production are the constraints, so the focus is on hiring and training for more growth.”

 

WILL SWAYNE

CEO | Marketing Results