Our customers can expect a minimum of 15% sales improvement, but don’t just take our word for it. Market-Partners has been featured in Selling Power Magazine, and here’s what our customers have to say about the benefits of working with us:
A Roadmap to Success
After implementing the sales road map developed with Market-Partners, Ascent Healthcare Solutions achieved several consecutive quarters of growth. In March of 2008, for example, the company was $2 million ahead in sales numbers, with steadily increasing sales revenues in the previous four quarters. Before Market-Partners’ involvement, Ascent was a $20 million company, but it is now expected to surpass $100 million in sales revenue.
Ascent COO Rick Ferreira identifies the repeatable sales process as a key element of his company’s success. “Market-Partners helped us develop a scientific way to sell,” he says. “It helped us put a process in place that was scalable, so I could add more accounts and add more people. The account management model was fully scalable, so it would produce predictable results if I did the same key activities in hospital A or hospital B.”
Ferreira can monitor progress within a standardized process that was formerly disorganized and inefficient. “Even when people today call us about an account they’re working on, one of the first questions we ask them is, ‘What stage are you in on the road map?’” he explains. The repeatable process also helps Ascent’s sales teams prequalify prospects. For example, “a hospital that will not give us access to the C-suite or to the physicians doesn’t line up for us as a good customer,” explains Ferriera, who also notes that such difficult customers inevitably cause problems or impede future sales.
The sales process also enables Ferreira to eliminate salespeople who take what he calls “the cowboy approach” to selling, rather than following the proven methodology. “The sales process has really lowered the level of the water, so you see the rocks right away – you know who’s doing the right thing consistently and who’s not.” Ferreira adds that the process helps keep individual sales efforts on track. “When I see an account that’s not performing well, I can go to the road map with the account team and walk through the stage it’s in and what the team has done,” he says. That knowledge then makes it easier to take corrective action and get the opportunity back on course.
Extract from the original article by Geoffrey James for Selling Power magazine, Jul/Aug 2008
Download the full article (reprint by permission of Selling Power magazine): download here
A Hands-On Guide for Sales Management
Defining Roles and Responsibilities in a Multi-Tiered Sales Effort
Sales is often perceived as a bastion of lone wolves – independent types who operate by themselves, for themselves. But the reality is that selling is very much a team sport. With a complex product of any nature, a sale requires the cooperation of and coordination with many departments – engineering, technical support, marketing, shipping, and more. And if there are no established protocols for the involvement of these departments, sales reps can wind up spending more time bouncing around their own companies than they do out selling to others.
That was the problem at one multibillion dollar designer and manufacturer of high technology components with a 300-person global sales force. Sales were growing and the company was doing well, but roles and responsibilities within the organization were unclear. Thus sales reps spent a lot of their time trying to establish internal relationships and align those resources to support their sales cycle. The practice led to reps feeling overly responsible for each account. For instance, if a shipment of components looked like it might be late, the rep would wind up breaking down pallets in his garage and driving them to the customer so they’d arrive on time. As a result, sales reps spent most of their time in an account maintenance mode and very little time out prospecting for new business.
“It was staggering to see a multibillion dollar company behaving like a start-up,” says Martyn Lewis, CEO of Market-Partners, Inc., the sales effectiveness experts brought in to assess and fix the problem. That assessment revealed the organization was quickly reaching gridlock. Their sales approach wasn’t scalable, says Lewis. They would not have been able to continue growing without hiring a lot of new people – a solution that was neither practical nor cost-effective.
Market-Partners tackled the challenge with a holistic approach that looked outside, inside, and across the organization.“We find the root cause of a problem is rarely sales skills,” explains Lewis. “We believe that in order to be successful at selling, you have to look at the overall selling model, and that includes everybody and everything that can impact selling in any way.” With that philosophy in mind, Market-Partners used their sevenstep process to transform the technology manufacturer into a highly efficient, salesdriven organization where roles and responsibilities are clearly defined.
Put simply, the technology manufacturer now knows who’s on first. Everyone who plays a part in the sales process knows exactly what they’re responsible for, at what time. Salespeople can hand off tasks without first having to establish internal relationships, and with confidence that those tasks will be handled efficiently. Most important, reps are no longer breaking down pallets in their garage. Instead, they’re spending that time building relationships with new prospects to grow more sales.
Extract from the original article by Heather Baldwin for Selling Power magazine, Mar 2007
Download the full article (reprint by permission of Selling Power magazine): download here
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