A digital printing company that did large format printing for construction drawings was well established and stuck in their ways. They had been around for 40+ years and had a good reputation. But their sales numbers were relatively flat. They grew or lost about 1-3% every year. They needed help to get to the next level of development and growth.
Problems
- They did not have a structured sales process
- They did not know the difference between marketing and sales
- Their delivery timelines were not good enough
- They did not offer anything unique and nothing they did was memorable
During the first two weeks we did an audit and a study of all operations. I met with all staff and went on sales calls and even met with customers. I went the extra mile and met with customers who had not bought anything in over 6 months. We identified …
Opportunities for growth:
- Marketing was virtually non existent and what they did was not effective
- Their sales process was broken and not effective we could do much better
- Their customer support was weak and not helpful
- Their offer was not compelling
- We were wasting the delivery team had – because they met customers every day
We did something radical here. I told them to stop marketing entirely for the first year and instead give me an extra sales person. We then got a list of every customer that had bought something over the past 2 years and broke them down into As, Bs and Cs. We called on each of them in person and on the phone and learnt more about what their needs were. And simply asked for the order!
We then got the sales team to run shotgun with the drivers and got them introduced to customers in the field (Construction job sites) who were placing the orders and had them build better relationships of trust and finally we empowered the customer service team to be proactive and ask if there was anything else they could help them with, we started giving Customer Service and Drivers bonuses for extra sales they made.
In conclusion:
- We focused on the customer and their needs
- We broke down all barriers between sales / marketing / delivery and customer service.
- All client facing staff were on the same team
- We got production involved and share success and failure stories with them
- We started smiling a whole lot more and
- Revenue shot up 20% in the first 12 months. This had never happened in 41 years.
