Situation Revenew’s internal sales team was not achieving its sales quotas due to a lack of coaching and performance management tools. As the company’s sole source of revenue (original business model) it was extremely important that this new team exceed their sales targets and represent the company in a professional manner. Unfortunately, when the performance issues became evident, management decided to focus on technological developments that could ultimately enable a self-service cloud platform.
Leadership Having previously managed outsourced sales teams I recommended that we secure the necessary sales supervisory staff and performance tracking tools by leveraging an outsourced model that could scale quickly to meet our growing business requirements. After providing data benchmarks and researching a variety of service providers, I was able to persuade our CEO to invest in a pilot program to compare the performance of the existing team with an outsourced team (twice the cost required twice the performance). Within 30 days I started to receive internal resistance to the pilot and it became essential to reassure and reground the management team in the importance of not making a quick decision before we completed the agreed upon pilot (time was required for product and sale training).
Result Over the next few months the team was fully staffed and trained. The outsourced sales team outperformed the internal team by 2x, became self-funding and exceeded sales targets for the first time. By partnering with a local third-party call center, I was able to work with our CMO to improve sales effectiveness (training, messaging, and other sales enablement tools) while applying best practices for managing an internal sales team (coaching, call monitoring, benchmark performance metrics). The model proved so effective we transitioned the outsourced team to an internal organization that I led.