Samco Machinery: Get Ready to Grow!

Challenge
For many years, Samco Machinery – manufacturers of roll forming machines for 3 decades – won business on the merits of great products, strong relationships and the sales leadership and hard work of Joe Repovs (company founder and President) and Jeff Carson. But in late 2003, Samco wanted to ramp up their sales effort beyond Joe and Jeff.

Analysis
In analyzing the existing team's skill set, Focus America concluded that:

Due to Joe’s other leadership responsibilities, Samco was too heavily dependent on one sales person.
The quoting philosophy often resulted in re-quoting and impulsive quoting, and ultimately a 3%-7% close ratio. While industry sales metrics averages were not known, 10-15% was deemed achievable
While marketing did a fantastic job generating sales leads, the sales reps were responsible for lead follow up, in addition to closing new business and managing existing customers. These vast responsibilities often resulted in leads falling through the cracks.
While Maximizer was the corporate sales technology platform, there was no sales process enabling Samco to truly understand "what's in the sales pipeline" beyond just seeing quotes. In addition, the technology requirements to enable off-site employees to access the database were frustrating and time-consuming.

Solution

To address the heavy dependence on Jeff Carson, another sales person was hired. Focus America’s role was to help Samco’s new sales manager offer management and sales coaching to the sales team in order to get off to a good start.
Regarding the quoting issues, Focus America customized and implemented their Project Analyzer Worksheet and Test. This tool gave the reps a structured sales process that disabled them from “just throwing at quote out” without strategizing.
To help ensure no valuable leads fell through the cracks, Focus America created a Business Development position at Samco with specific responsibilities for sales lead generation, follow up and cultivation. Focus America did the initial training and ongoing management for this new role.
To give Samco full clarity and visibility of their sales pipeline – as well as improve off-site access – Focus America performed a CRM implementation, switching Samco from Maximizer to Salesforce.com. Focus America also set up the Sales Roadmap sales methodology and executed the sales training as well.

Result
As a result of the great work put forth from Focus America:

After six months, the entire sales team is exceeding their sales target by over 35%.
The close ratio has improved to over 25%.
The new Business Development Representative has enabled the sales team to confidently offload work and leads are no longer falling through the cracks.
The Sales Roadmap and Salesforce.com CRM implementation have been successfully incorporated into the sales structure and, while it’s still early, all signs show that far deeper and clearer visibility is on the horizon.