Case Study: The Gordon Flesch Company

COMPANY OVERVIEW
Name: The Gordon Flesch Company
Industry: Office Products and Document Management
Client Since: April 2004

Training Areas Covered:

A. Sales Competency & Performance Metric Awareness
B. ‘Top-down’ Appointment Strategy
C. Setting ‘Targeted’ business appointments
D. Identifying and achieving weekly activity goals

Training Objective:

• Improve participants Conversation-to-appointment ratio
• Improve number of new appointments
• Set appointments with ‘Targeted’ decision makers to increase Results
• Spend less time achieving required results
• Shift prospecting paradigm to a ‘Top-down’ approach

I. The Challenge

 The Gordon Flesch Company’s (5) Illinois sales offices were not achieving enough sales appointments in line with their stated sales goals. Within their selling regions were numerous competitors, many relying on ‘Commodity’ type selling tactics.

Further, their largest selling opportunity resided in downtown Chicago, where the majority of businesses had stringent security measures restricting traditional ‘foot’ prospecting by sales reps.

Added to this challenge, 80% of the Illinois sales force had never used the telephone as a prospecting tool. The average prospecting conversation conversion ratio was in the range of 10-15 percent.

JDH Group Assessment: (Cons) Main target market restricted by security at the door and reps were new to a ‘Top-down’ selling methodology. Extremely competitive market with most competitors strategic offering based on saving money. No current methodology or process for targeted prospecting in place. Business people with ‘Fiscal authority’ normally do not sit down with copier reps.

They currently were ineffective as a group with a 10-15% Conversation-to-appointment ratio, spending too much time to get too little results.

(Pros) Client service suite had a measurable benefit for small and medium size businesses, with both hard and soft dollars. Management supported a ‘Mentorship’ sales Culture. Sales leadership was open to a systematic approach to prospecting tied to results and was willing to lead a process to achieve it.

 II. The Strategy  

The Gordon Flesch management declined the X2 ROI Survey diagnostic process. They were primarily interested in any notable improvement in their prospecting skill-set.

Since using the telephone as an effective prospecting tool was foreign to the current method of operation, JDH Group set a training goal of achieving a 40-50% Conversation-to-appointment ratio. That would enable participants to spend less time to achieve the required number of new appointments each week based on their individual performance numbers.

Secondarily, Gordon Flesch wanted to further differentiate themselves from their competitors and be considered a solutions-based business consultant rather than a vendor pushing equipment, so a ‘Top–down’ selling model was agreed upon. Prospecting contacts were limited to these titles of responsibility and prepared for the 2-day X2 Boot Camp.

The X2 Sales System™ 6-week training process was initiated in (5) sales offices throughout Illinois with the training objective of improving the Gordon Flesch team’s prospecting skill-set by 3X.

 III. Training Results

 JDH Group implemented the X2 Pre-training process in Gordon Flesch locations and facilitated (5) 2-day X2 Boot Camps. After a review of the customized X2 Initiator™ Desktop training tool, participants made live prospecting calls utilizing the X2 conversation methodology and individually entered into coaching sessions with Jeff Hardesty, developer of the X2 Sales System™. Each participant was exercised after each conversation, working them through their personal learning curve.

2-Day X2 Boot Camp Results

• Conversation-to-appointment ratios increased to 41% for a conversion improvement of 268%.
• 126 targeted ‘Top-down’ appointments were set
• Based on the number of new ‘Top-down’ appointments set and their current sales performance numbers, the training ROI estimate was 634%