Client
- Medium-sized international freight-forwarder offering global logistics solutions (seafreight, airfreight, customs brokerage, contract logistics, continental transportation, supply chain management services).
- Subsidiary in France.
Challenges
- The client’ssales pipeline in France was not developed well enough to ensure the annual new business acquisition budget would hit expected targets.
- The French subsidiary had under-performed in the previous year.
- Need for support in new business development to reduce dependency on recurrent customers.
- Increase needed in sales prospecting activities to maximize the client’s return on investment in the sales team.
Tokema Approach
- Tokema was appointed by the client to facilitate the annual sales convention, where the Sales Effectiveness initiative was officially launched.
- This initiative was one of the key strategic actions documented in the client’s sales strategy.
- An initial assessment of the sales executive team was conducted by Tokema consultants using the Tokema
- Effective Sell methodology and an action plan was mutually agreed with the client.
- This action plan was monitored by the National Sales Director and was included in the overall sales strategy of the client’s business.
- ‘In field’ coaching sessions were conducted by Tokema consultants to improve territory management, improve prospect profiling/targeting and increase customer facing activities.
- Several tools were implemented or improved to boost the sales activity and the pipeline value.
- Joined sales calls were carried out with Tokema consultants as part of the Sales Effectiveness coaching programme.
Benefits
- Sales executives’ customer facing activities increased from 33% to 61% of working time within 12 months.
- Sales pipeline value of qualified opportunities increased x5 within 12 months.
- Significant increase of number of appointments per month.
- Sales executives increased productivity due to more efficient territory management.
- Each sales executive retained and demonstrated a better knowledge of the local economy and importers/exporters on the assigned territory.