Wow! Sales Transformation Done

I recently had the opportunity to interview Mark Pollard, National Sales Leader, at Corporate Traveller Australia to discuss how they are achieving truly amazing sales results. Corporate Traveller is Australia’s largest travel agency dedicated to small to medium businesses that transact up to $2million in annual travel spend. Mark and his team are building positively engaged sales culture. Read on for your opportunity to come and meet Mark in person but here are the facts that caused me to want to understand more about the way they approach sales enablement:

• Company growth sales target based on ramping to a total headcount of 85 salespeople
• Chose to reduce the number of salespeople from a peak of 75 down to 55 and increase the investment in people, processes, and technology to better enable the team and achieve the overall growth revenue target
• Reduced sales staff churn (turnover) from 50% down to 20% while significantly increasing the percentage of successful salespeople
• Achieved the company target with 23% less salespeople and also created in excess of $500,000 on the bottom line in direct net cost savings.

I will be going deeper with Mark during breakfast events in Sydney and Melbourne on June 5th and 6th where you can discuss strategies with your peers and also and ask Mark your own questions.

• Register here for Sydney breakfast event on June 5th at 7:30 am – 9:30 am
• Register here for Melbourne breakfast event on June 6th at 7:30 am – 9:30 am

During these sales leadership events, there will be roundtable discussions where you can explore with your peers how to best create winning culture and leverage technology to drive sales success.

Mark and his team have achieved some amazing results with a vibrant positive culture and he believes that “throwing bodies at sales targets is not the way to intelligently solve a revenue problem.” Instead, they improved sales employee satisfaction and retention while hitting targets, and dramatically improved the profitability of the sales function.

In the conversation on stage and afterward, I asked Mark about the impact of all this on his salespeople. “Investing in our people has created a happier and more successful team. We now have a healthy bell-curve of tenure where one-third are new, one-third have several years of experience with us and one-third are long-term – in excess of three years.” Mark went on to say, “We now have a happier team where a far great proportion are over target… there is a stronger sense of success and team spirit in the group.”

Reducing staff turnover delivers massive benefits to everyone so I asked Mark about his approach to de-risking the hiring process. “We take a strategic approach to recruitment for cultural fit and diversity. We talk about ‘brightness of future’ in our business and seek that in our people. We’ve also developed strong onboarding processes and ongoing investment in our people as individuals with training, coaching and the right tools including Salesforce.”

During my keynote that preceded the interview, I made the point that beyond IQ and EQ, sellers today need TQ (technical Quotient) to be adept in using the technologies, platforms and tools that create the necessary levels of efficiency and effectiveness required today. I asked Mark how Corporate Traveller uses technology to fuel the success of their team.

“For us, it’s all about moving the focus away from just the company number to instead focus on the seller’s success and in turn how they provide value to customers so those customers can be more successful. The technology needs to support that focus.”

Mark told me how they reverse engineered the input metrics for the sales role and created the ‘100 club’ where the CRM reports on input activities such as emails sent, calls logged, discover questions asked and completed, proposals sent, etc. “Achieving 100 points of contact consistently gets the person into the 100 Club and we know these people achieve their revenue targets.”

Corporate Traveller uses CRM to enable their sales processes as the execution platform to transform and drive healthy sales culture. Tailored dashboards are used for coaching and reviews with their ‘30/60/90 review process’ which focuses on input metrics, not just results. They also use system reports that create a proactive focus on customer retention beyond customer acquisition.

Key take-aways from Mark Pollard’s insights:

1. Create a culture of customer and salesperson success rather than just the overall company number
2. Focus on cultural fit as a key prerequisite in hiring and then invest in your people with training, coaching, and the very best tools
3. Enable sales process with technology that measures the key input metrics rather than just backward-looking results.

Come and meet Mark in Sydney on June 5th or Melbourne on June 6th where you can also discuss strategies with your peers:

• Register here for Sydney breakfast event on June 5th at 7:30 am – 9:30 am
• Register here for Melbourne breakfast event on June 6th at 7:30 am – 9:30 am

About Mark Pollard: With 25 years sales and leadership experience, Mark joined the Corporate Traveller team in 2015 from SilverNeedle Hospitality Group where he was Vice President of Sales and Marketing, based in Singapore. His knowledge of the travel industry stems from a lengthy career in the hotel industry where he held several senior management roles including Director of Corporate Sales for Accor and Director of Sales for Constellation Hotel Group.

Here is the keynote that preceded the interview and if you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' button and also share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment. Please also follow my LinkedIn post page for all my articles.

Main image purchased from iStock - 593328520