Results

Superior Glove is Canada’s largest work glove manufacturer. The company sells specialized work gloves across North America and Europe to companies such as Toyota Manufacturing, US Steel and Alcelormittal.

Joe Geng, Superior Glove’s President was attracted to Ballistix as he believed the consultancy’s Sales Process Engineering (SPE) methodology offered a solution to his firm’s lack of clarity around the sales process.

Joe explains:

“We really had no idea what was happening day to day with our sales team. We had a gut feeling that our sales team was spending too much time on customer service issues but no way to measure how bad the situation really was.”

More specifically, Joe had concerns that sales leads weren’t being followed-up a timely manner (sometimes not at all) and the sales team was underutilized partially due to structuring sales territories on guess work.

An unfortunate consequence of this situation was that it was taking Superior Glove at least a year to determine if a new hire was effective.

“We tried in the past implementing a CRM system to help us manage our sales force and get a better understanding of what was going on in the field. This failed miserably,” explains Joe.

“Our sales management spent a lot time chasing our sales team to report on CRM but the results were spotty. Our sales team wanted to spend time selling not filling in reports on our CRM.”

Looking for a solution they reached out to Ballistix.

“We were impressed with Ballistix’s Sales Process Engineering methodology and decided to commission a project,” adds Joe.

After a challenging and exhaustive Solution Design Workshop a number of critical changes to the current sales process were mapped out:

Add a sales coordinator for every two salespeople. The goal was to give the team sales coordinators to manage calendars, book appointments, follow up leads and so on to free up a huge chunk of time so the sales people could focus on what they do best—sell!.

Restructure the customer service department to ensure that customer issues were being handled properly. This was to dramatically reduce the number of customer issues and repeat order calls that were preventing the sales team from focusing on new sales.

Implement a systematic work flow for finding and adding new distributors. In spite of the fact that a critical key for growth was finding and building relationships with new distributors, there was no formal plan in place.

Implement a sales reporting system. The data required for this report was entered by the sales coordinators and viewed by the sales manager and sales team each week.

Joe was delighted how well the changes went and, more importantly, how well the changes were embraced by the sales team.

“Most salespeople were thrilled to hand over customer service, appointment setting and sales reporting to the sales coordinators and spend all their time in front of customers, generating new business,”, adds said Joe.

According to Joe, the sales Management Information System (MIS ) implemented by Ballistix was a big breakthrough.

“The MIS was managed by the sales coordinators, not the sales people. This was huge,” explains Joe..

“It allowed us to have an accurate view of what was going on in each sales territory. This allowed our sales management to see ahead of time where we were having issues and take the appropriate actions to improve the situation. For example, we were able to see territories where a salesperson was underutilized and increase marketing efforts in that area or help the salesperson to find and set up new distributors.”.

THE RESULTS

Joe reports in the 9 months since working with Ballistix, the sales team utilization has increased dramatically to sit at an average of 80% across the entire team. More importantly, overall sales have increased by 10% in a difficult economic environment with a massive 50% increase in US sales.

“Another big breakthrough is that we now have the visibility to see if a new sales person is working out within months, not years. This has given us the confidence to add new sales people and develop new territories at a much faster pace than we ever previously dreamed possible,” concludes Joe.

JOE GENG
Superior Glove
President

Before working with Ballistix, TEBA had a small number of salespeople performing, collectively, very few sales calls.

TEBA implemented the Ballistix approach to sales process with centralized scheduling and a coordinated approach to lead generation and business development. A key change was to give the primary responsibility back to the CEO who performed a number of high-value sales appointments each week originated and managed by a dedicated sales coordinator.

TEBA now uses events and direct mail to generate a decent volume of sales appointments and in spite of the fact that new system requires him to make sales calls, he has more spare capacity than he has ever had.

Justin, thank you for your time on this project. I just wanted to say that I can’t commend you highly enough on the value you have provided to my business. Within a few hours of commencing this project, I was already getting enormous value.

Your clear cut no BS approach to breaking a business down into it’s components and analyzing these for what they are was amazing. I know have a very clear plan that I believe will deliver a greater outcome at a lower cost.

Sincerely,

FRANK STILLONE

The Silent Partner