Background

Tom Feather is a Senior Tech Sales leader and is responsible for managing between 80-90 sales staff. The pandemic led to both rapid growth in the sales force as well as managing a more complex, hybrid workforce.  

Tom oversees an ever-growing team, which currently numbers between 80 and 90 staff members, dispersed across multiple geographical locations. This team is not only large but also diverse in its skillsets, including everything from sales and marketing experts to customer success and data analysis specialists. 

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for business growth but also accelerated the need to manage a more complex organisation with many staff recruited on a remote working basis.  Their business grew exponentially, and Tom's role demanded new strategies for operational efficiency and team management to meet those needs.

Challenges

The growing team and burgeoning responsibilities brought on by the pandemic-induced business boom led to a host of challenges for Tom.

• Recruitment, Onboarding, and Training: With new staff joining the team at an unprecedented rate due to the expansion, the onboarding process became overwhelming. Time zones, language barriers, and the sheer volume of incoming team members strained existing onboarding protocols. 

• Skills & sales management at scale: Although using a leading CRM tool that is great for pipeline management it had many gaps in terms of what’s needed to manage a sales team at scale.  

• Work Management: Managing such a diverse and geographically scattered team required not just people skills but also a considerable time commitment. Balancing team management, operational tasks, and new client acquisition became a juggling act that had Tom working long hours, often at the expense of personal time. 

• Quality of Information: Tom needed a way to quickly get accurate and comprehensive updates. When decisions are made on the fly, the quality of the information is crucial.  

• Standardisation & Alignment: EIMS's dispersed workforce across different time zones and cultural settings posed a huge challenge in standardising processes and workflows. 

Tom knew that these challenges required more than just a managerial fix; they needed a technological solution that could standardise, and streamline his ever-increasing operational challenges. 

Solution

EIMS decided to implement Demeter, a cutting-edge, AI-friendly Work OS platform that was designed to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows and offer a wide range of customizable solutions. 

• Recruitment, Onboarding, and Training: Demeter featured standard templates for recruitment, onboarding and enablement. It pulled together a view of the employee across previously disparate systems (job boards, finance systems & our internal HR systems).  

• Skills & sales management at scale: Demeter allowed Tom to build best practise inspection into his sales management processes ensuring that each step of the sales process could be measured. Tom is now able to report on sales behaviours not just sales performance.  

• Work Management: Now that all workflows are built Tom is able to spot ‘overloading’ of work within his team and load balance more easily between team members. Work is much easier to distribute in the first place. Team members know what they should be doing and by when.  

• Quality of Information: The platform enabled us to define Quality assurance policies and then measure that they were being adhered to. These included recording and archiving all client interactions, and monitoring compliance to predefined service level agreements (SLAs). These features were instrumental in maintaining the high standards within the sales team. 

• Standardisation & Optimisation of process: By standardising the processes Tom was able to identify where processes could be improved. As an example Demeter simplified client interaction by automating the invoicing and payment tracking process. This allowed the sales team so spend more time on what they do best, sell! 

Results 

The results of the implementation were nothing short of transformative. 

• Sales Efficiency: Tasks that previously required hours could now be completed in a fraction of the time, thanks to Demeter. Tom noted a 33% reduction in the average onboarding time for new hires, allowing them to become revenue productive more quickly. Furthermore, the adherence of sales disciplines went up, helping to deliver industry beating win rates at scale.  

• Speed of decision making: Meeting time has reducing in half, whilst quality of decision making has gone up. Tom is now able to report on sales skills, behaviours and performance in one view. Allowing him and his team to make much more rounded decisions, much more quickly.  

• Self-Sufficiency: Perhaps one of the most underrated benefits was the newfound ability for team members to perform their duties without manager support. The Demeter platform provided a robust knowledge base and decision-support system that enabled employees to act more independently. Managers now spend less than 5% of their time resolving issues for their team, and have been able to redeploy that time to proactively coach and improve sales performance.  

In conclusion, Tom believes that Demeter has been instrumental in helping him successfully scaling up his sales operations. Without it, the organisational strain of growth would have led to inefficiencies that could have impeded or even reversed the company’s success. 

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