Re-engineering the Sales Process in Telephony Sales

Prudential sought to increase revenue and market share within their intermediated market telephony sales channel, consisting of 75 Account Managers and 8 Sales Managers. Lacking any formal sales process, individuals relied heavily on personal relationships to engage accounts. Sales teams needed to think outside of the box to promote a broader product range to both new and regular IFA’s. The Client’s training and development pathways needed attention. Bigrock’s discovery process found:

• Promotion of Sales Managers was based on sales abilities rather than management potential.

• People development was ad hoc and inconsistent

This had resulted in skill gaps in sales and sales management.

Over a four month period the Bigrock team worked with the Client’s telephony sales division to:

• Create a Value Proposition statement

• Integrate this Value Proposition within a re-engineered sales process

Bigrock designed and delivered a Telephone Sales Excellence programme and a Telephone Sales Management programme. To ensure significant phone coverage, the programmes were split into 3 modules and repeated separately for each sales team to ensure all delegates could undergo training without compromising service.

An independent evaluation within Prudential rated the programme as “excellent” in the relevant levels of the Kirkpatrick evaluation model.

The evaluation reported that:

• There had been a positive shift in behaviours trained across the board.
• In the month after the conclusion of the last training module, the team had written £0.5m APE from previously dormant accounts.
• Hence the evaluation attributed a minimum return of 10 times the initial investment when the sales process was used to contact dormant accounts.