Advantage Success Case: Healthcare Company

What You Need: Make sure the team stays on track.

Successful sales is an art, a discipline, and a science. We provide sales processes that not only structure in accountability, but also teach the team to engage in the practices of successful selling – planning, hiring, coaching, and forecasting — on a consistent basis.

ADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS: Custom Sales Leadership Cadence; The Advantage Way^SM, HR Chally Talent Audit; Symphony; Best Match; Custom sales management operating system; Custom new hire training and onboarding program; Custom questioning, listening, coaching, and leadership skills programs.

The Road to Optimal Sales Performance and World-Class Rewards

How a healthcare company transformed its sales organization with the Right People, Right Process, and Right Capabilities —and achieved dramatic, industry-leading sales performance.

Challenge

The country’s fifth-largest home respiratory therapy company partners with local physicians to provide in-home oxygen, respiratory medication, and sleep therapy to more than 120,000 patients in 20 states. In 2007, the company had hit a plateau. Turnover was high and growing. The sales team was overly dependent on a few sales stars. The approach to managing the sales organization was entrepreneurial and lacked goal alignment.

Company leaders knew that the sales organization lacked the consistency, performance expectations, and accountability to grow the business. The CEO realized, “The approach to selling that had been highly effective in our former stage of evolution simply wasn’t working now that the business was so large.”

Without a major change, it was clear that the company would not be able to rise to the level required to thrive in the highly competitive, cost-containment healthcare environment.

Success Solution

Advantage Partner and cofounder John Hoskins was asked to help take the company from where it was to where it needed to go. It would be a long road, but the CEO and sales leaders were fully committed to doing whatever it took in order to reach world-class.

Hoskins knew that the key to optimizing sales force performance was the integration of sales and sales leadership, and a systems approach that addressed the sales organization as a whole. “Your sales management process can’t support world-class results unless it rests upon a firm foundation,” he explained. The healthcare sales organization required a complete transformation, including:

• Right People: putting the right sales people in the right roles (focus: validated sales force assessments, hiring and candidate selection programs)
• Right Process: giving sales managers a consistent cadence for managing, coaching, and measuring performance (focus: creating and installing a sales leadership cadence process)
• Right Capabilities: building salespeople’s ability to understand customers better and sell more (focus: enablement tools and skill development for the entire organization)
• making sure the initiative achieved the required business impact (focus: integrating The Advantage Way^SM into each stage of the journey)

Advantage and the company focused management development first, then hiring and candidate selection. The next step was to put a sales leadership cadence process in place. Training for the sales team came later.

The three-year sales transformation initiative included a broad range of solutions: A new sales cadence gave sales people at every level a consistent way to conduct their activities, plus a process with key metrics they could use to drive sales. A sales force Talent Audit from HR Chally assessed competencies of sales and customer service reps, and the profiles that resulted helped managers properly place, develop, coach, and retain salespeople. The audit results and profiles were also used to create a New Hire Training Orientation and On-boarding program.

Managers’ ability to lead was transformed via a series of customized learning programs. Managers improved they way they assessed, planned, and managed individual and team performance after experiencing the BTS Symphony program. Hoskins and his team also created questioning and listening skills modules for managers; as well as selection skills, coaching skills, and project management training. The BTS Best Match approach formed the core of an interviewing skills program.

The sales team transformation also impacted how field sales people achieved goals. A field improvement and coaching initiative used a customized Porter Henry SalesAbility model to plan and conduct better sales calls. “Ride-alongs” were created to help managers coach sales reps on-site, and Impact Maps (an Advantage Way tool) were used by both parties to evaluate and debrief sales call success.

Today, the salespeople’s productivity is higher than that of any other company in the industry — by far. Turnover has dropped by more than half. Salespeople are overachieving their quotas. All of the salespeople in this healthcare company receive outstanding training and development, and are led by a professional sales management group.

The CEO explains, “We really did a comprehensive overhaul of our sales organization. We changed how we hire, screen, manage, train, and compensate. Taken together and done well collectively, these changes have made a tremendously positive impact on the business.” Moreover, he expects that the great results from their sales transformation will just keep getting better. “One of the powerful things that John Hoskins and his organization help companies do is to build in continuous improvement,” he adds. “If you really stick with the process — and can refine, improve, and tailor it to your company over time — you just get better and better and better. That’s incredibly powerful.”

» Read the full success case