“We saw a night-and-day difference in performance from our previous approach and a much higher return on our sales investment.
The Sales Overdrive team is very professional and keeps its commitments. We are building the best intersection of market-driven products and market need. They’ve brought us a phenomenal response in all our service areas.”
– Executive Director, Girls and Boys Town, National Resource and Training Center
About the Client
Girls and Boys Town, the original Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, is a leader in the treatment and care of abused, abandoned and neglected girls and boys. It‘s National Resource and Training Center (NRTC) provides professional services and products to practitioners and organizations worldwide in the fields of Education, Child and Family Services and Behavioral Health.
Situation
The NRTC had struggled to sell its products and services effectively for almost a decade. Failing to achieve adequate sales growth internally, it turned to an outsourcer but was very poorly served and terminated that relationship in early in 2002. Unwavering ill its intent on growing sales, the NRTC asked Sales Overdrive to assess their situation and provide a comprehensive outsourced sales and marketing solution.
Considerations
Overdrive analyzed the client’s business model and sales organization, identifying seven major weaknesses that had to be rectified for the NRTC to accomplish its revenue objectives. These were as follows:
- The lack of a clearly defined and articulated NRTC vision and mission
- An inadequate understanding of the market and no cohesive strategy
- Absence of a sustainable, repeatable set of sales and marketing processes
- Inability to acquire, train and retain top talent
- Lacking sales leadership and informal management of the sales team
- No leverage of high value resources through teaming or the use of key sales accelerators
- Lagging product development and no focus on sales execution
On the execution level, account research was inadequate, sales efforts were reactive and there was no system or process in use to manage opportunities. There was no strategy or sales process. The sales people were generally knowledgeable about the industry and products but unskilled in sales.
Although the sales and marketing organization was large and balanced between sales and marketing, all key sales metrics were in the red. There was very little linkage between Operations, Sales and Marketing initiatives, creating significant staffing imbalances. The sales team was geographically centralized at the NRTC headquarters in Omaha rather than close to the customer base.
Measurement and reporting was inadequate and compensation plans were not built in such a way as to reward sales professionals for the behaviors most predictive of sales success.
The sales force automation tool in use was incapable of providing management with the key performance indicators necessary to manage the business unit.
Solution
The NRTC turned to Overdrive to take advantage of its great experience in the education market and its track record of fielding and managing large national insourced and outsourced sales teams; as well as its ability to accelerate new top line revenue and market share capture.
Overdrive performed a comprehensive market analysis and assessment on which it based an end-to-end sales and marketing growth strategy and sales acceleration plan that described all of the actions, tools and resources necessary to meet the long-term objectives of the NRTC. The plan drew detailed conclusions regarding market dynamics and identified new vertical industries and the means to identify specific opportunity rich school districts on which to concentrate.
Within a month, Overdrive installed its Overdrive™ Sales and Marketing Processes and a variety of new supporting sales tools and techniques needed to drive the new strategy, including in-field enrollment tools as well as the tracking, reporting and knowledge capture methodology necessary to enable and manage a best-in-class sales team.
Simultaneously, Overdrive sourced, screened and recruited the new sales team consisting of regional sales professionals from both the existing group, both from our Overdrive™ community and elsewhere. We also added a National VP Sales from Sales Overdrive’s own senior ranks to drive the new sales process.
Next, Overdrive optimized the company’s sales organization by providing ongoing K-12 district by district research and inside sales professionals focused on high probability opportunities, thereby making it much more effective. Overdrive selected and implemented an improved sales force automation tool with which management could measure performance, identify and institutionalize best practices and design increasingly effective training and coaching protocols.
Overdrive built a cohesive compensation strategy and specific measurement and reward Systems. A “Talent Exchange” teaming model was implemented to leverage the strengths of the individual contributors and create a teaming environment.
Overdrive then built and trained sales and marketing “pursuit teams” focused on specific priority targets and consisted of field sales, marketing and subject matter experts, which built new pipeline opportunities while closing sales with near-term prospects and clients very rapidly.
Overdrive also provided ongoing product development, marketing, PR and technical assistance.
Results
Within sixty days of project launch the prior sales organization was reduced by two thirds, and the remaining group was reconstituted to include stronger, more skilled sales professionals supported by researchers and a strong inside sales group centralized and managed in Overdrive’s Dallas office. We also assumed responsibility for Marketing and PR and rerouted all inbound 800 calls into our contact center.
Overdrive has created increased market traction, brand awareness, and the cost effectiveness of sales and marketing spend. After 90 days of project launch, the pipeline of prospects and new closed business increased by 50%. Within one year, revenue from new name accounts increased 300%.