Recruitment consultancy

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.

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 Whitman, Drake Project Manager. “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 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.

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”.