Speaker:

Joe Geng, VP

Location:

Ontario, Canada

Product:

Glove manufacturer and distributor

Duration:

9 months

Situation:

While customers preferred to transact with general distributors, the incumbent sales model was better suited to direct sales - resulting in salespeople operating as autonomous intermediaries and poor visibility over field-based sales activities.

Action:

Convert sales people into channel managers and to integrate them into a cohesive sales and marketing team. Convert salespeople from commission-based renumeration to salary-based renumeration. Centralise the scheduling of both customer service and sales activities and launch structured promotional activities.

Result:

Transitioned all salespeople to channel managers on salary (not commissions). Increased the effective practice of channel managers enabling them to see double the number of clients while simultaneously improving customer service. Achieved 25% increase in sales to previous year.

Speaker:

Rosie Davidson, CEO

Location:

Perth, Australia

Product:

Accounting and Bookkeeping Services

Duration:

4 months

Situation:

Craft-shop situation in sales and production impairing the ability to schedule the work to eliminate multi-tasking and scale the business.

Action:

Migrate time-and-material billing to a flat monthly retainer for ALL clients. Transition production from a 'sole practitioner' to a 'factory' model. Centralise the scheduling of both production and sales activities and launch structured promotional activities.

Result:

Transitioned all current accounts to project billing WITHOUT the loss of any clients. Increased the effective practice of staff enabling them to take on 20% MORE WORK while simultaneously improving customer service. Introduced formal approach to new business development including a systemised lead generation program to meet the goal of four formal sales appointments a week.

Speaker:

Will Swayne. Founder and Chief Executive.

Location:

Australia

Product:

Marketing Results provides web development and internet marketing specialising in high-throughput
lead-generation marketing.

Duration:

6 months

Situation:

Craft-shop situation in sales and production impairing the ability to easily scale the business.

Action:

Introduce division of labour to both sales and production environments.  Add a master scheduler to
plan both functions. Add the standard Ballistix sales management-information system.  Custom build a part-manual / part-electronic production scheduling system.

Result:

The salesperson now has twice the output for half the time spent — a 400% increase in throughput.
Sales have increased by 30% and, in production, on-time delivery and service quality has improved significantly. Business is growing effortlessly.

Speaker:

Charley Courey, President

Location:

USA

Product:

Specialty manufacturer of suspended wooden ceilings

Duration:

7 months

Situation:

Project managers would oversee many tasks in the production process simultaneously.
Bottlenecks slowed execution and inhibited responsive customer service.

Action:

Ballistix standardise the workflow process and put in place technology and central coordinator
to manage and oversee hand-off of tasks through individual phases.

Result:

Improved execution and management has visibility of the process to respond to scheduling crises
before they arise. There is now capacity for higher throughput without bogging down delivery.

Speaker:

Tim Winard, Chief Operating Officer

Location:

USA

Product:

Develops and manufactures work-holding products for companies in North and South America that perform CNC machining.

Duration:

6 months

Situation:

Ballistix used division of labour to create a sales support and
promotion team and get Kitagawa’s territory managers out seeing more customers.

Result:

Kitagawa has an easily scalable sales process where BDMs now
perform three times as many appointments with one-third fewer
people in that position and management has complete visibility of existing opportunities. 

Post script: Since this video interview Kitagawa has gone on to record an on-time delivery rate of 95%. Tim Winard writes:

"Due to our WIP meetings, I can say that our own on-time rates are now consistently over 95%. The occasions they are not, can frequently be attributed to our suppliers not delivering on time to us.

A key element that really assisted the success of the WIP meeting process is having a member from each dept represented and especially having an individual at the end of the work flow (i.e. warehouse, Operations Mgr) with a strong personality/incentive to pull orders through the system during WIP meetings.

It helps everyone upstream to keep the momentum up through the entire work flow with this ‘end party’ wanting to ship more, more, more… "

Speaker:

John Scribante, President

Location:

USA

Product:

Ultra-efficient energy management systems for the commercial
and industrial sectors.

Duration:

9 months

Situation:

No formal sales process and salespeople performing only a couple of BDM appointments per week.

Action:

Ballistix built a sales support team comprising sales coordinators and a promotional team using
direct mail pieces to generate “warm” sales opportunities.

Result:

Division of labour resulted in BDM conducting more than 20 face-to-face appointments per week per
while direct mail offers increased appointment-setting promotion dramatically.

Speaker:

Henry Camp, Owner

Location:

USA

Product:

Distributor of packaging supplies

Duration:

9 months

Situation:

Operating in a commoditised market where price competition prevails. No control of autonomous salespeople creating a situation where they relied on sales “superstars”.

Action:

Ballistix helped Shippers to promote “Easy Supply Program” (a new product offering to differentiate
the Shippers product in market) and a sales support team to allow salespeople to concentrate solely
on BDM appointments.

Result:

Now making 15-20 business development call each week and have subsequently expanded sales force to cope with increased BDM activity. Sales have increased every month since the project began.