Chemical Sales – The Big Results from this Big Challenge
Starting in December 2016 we started to work with a chemical company. Now maybe you think selling chemicals has got to be pretty easy, but it’s not. Chemicals are often a commodity, very price competitive, hard to differentiate and almost every customer already has a supplier. It makes breaking into any new account very challenging. Our client is also a small player in the market and perhaps perceived as too small to handle larger accounts. The sales team are all young guys where a lot of older clients immediately presume some “whippersnapper” can’t know much about chemical (even though our sales guys have a decade in the business).
So in January we went to work. We looked all a variety of places we needed to improve and fix. Here is the order of what we focused on and tackled:
- We created baseline levels of activity each week and started tracking that activity every week. It included calls, emails, proposals and meetings held each week. (we had some more specific details to what qualified for each category)
- We re-vamped the proposals to be more effective to read, easier to get the summary and more focused on differentiators in company, product and service
- We broke the market into small accounts, good accounts, dream accounts and started to map activities to each segment (yes, small accounts got the least time now)
- We used our #1 Evolve Closing Technique method to start to increase the number of sales we actually closed – without having to do more work; just more effective.
- We setup new sales questions that went beyond just asking how much product they use. We got into service, their business goals, their issues and then finally their perceptions of pricing.
- We implemented over half of the 9 Secrets to Sales Mastery in the first 4 months and immediately saw more quality meetings, more referrals and a better closing rate
- We strategized on the big Dream accounts and starting taking small steps on them every single week
- We re-scripted their cold call approach so that people actually listened and we got more appointments setup for each representative
- We learned about personality profiles, risk adversity and buying styles to see how that was affecting every sales situation
- We began a series of value added services – seminars, manufacturer tours, production line review, social times (golf, meals and a cold beer once in a while)
There were countless other activity we added, learned and refined over the first 5 months of the year. Here were some of the results:
- Record High Months for Overall Sales:
- December, January, February, March, April
- 2.8x’s the Number of New Client Signings in 2017
- Increase in Proposals Out
- No baseline but average weekly output now of 7.6 per week
- Increase in Cold Calls
- Would argue it was close to zero, now approaching 28 cold contacts per week
- Weekly Sales Appointments
- Up from an average of 4 to over 8.2 meetings per week
- Increased the pipeline value of potential sales by over $800,000 annually
Soft Benefits
- Tracking of sales and personal performance – now they wanted to compete and win!
- Framing the mindset for the prospect and sales guys alike
- Stronger confidence
- Belief that they could compete with anyone in the market
- Ambition now to break into an international market
