Commercial Distribution Company - Sales Expansion
Yield’s client is a commercial distributor of parts and components and has over 10,000 customers across a variety of industries. It was an early adopter of ecommerce and had ridden the wave of growth for nearly 10 years. The growth was starting to get more challenging, however, as an increasing amount of volume was moving to marketplaces (e.g. Amazon) and the acquisition cost through digital channels continued to rise.
Our client at first engaged Yield to help develop a more rigorous attribution model and performance measurement tech stack so that it could improve visibility on the channels, products and ads that worked. Our relationship expanded over time to help upgrade the sales function to improve efficiency, productivity and velocity.
It’s All About the Data
Our client has thousands of SKUs and Clients and sells to multiple industries across several channels. Not surprisingly, this complexity led to data silos that made it nearly impossible to get a holistic view of a customer relationship. The company was already well on its way to taming this data madness via a warehouse (Snowflake) and BI reporting tool (Mode Analytics). We expanded the usability of this data by incorporating a structure attribution tagging model, which then opened up the ability to determine ROI down to the campaign, ad and product level.
Since this was, by far, the hottest burning fire, we jumped right in on both technical design and implementation to get our client up and running quickly. This purview on customer data allowed us to quickly segment by industry, tier and region to prioritize those with the highest near term opportunity.
Ramping Up Inside Sales
At the beginning of our engagement, the Company had just launched its first “real” attempt at inside sales, having hired an experienced leader who assembled a team, developed a process and showed early signs of success. The challenge, however, was that progress was linear (new body, more sales; no body, no sales). A transition of sales leadership was the catalyst that the executive leadership team used to bring us in to validate the structure and priorities of the team, so we did what we do best and started with the data.
Our team went deep into customer data, by rep, by industry, by region, etc. to identify segments and patterns to use for the allocation of accounts and prospects. We developed a 3-tier coverage model consisting of account managers (farmers), industry specialists (hunters) and inbound. We augmented these groups with a hyper-efficient sales development function that we equipped with several tools to automate parts of the process to enable personalization at scale. We worked closely with the new sales leadership to implement this new account coverage model over the course of a fiscal quarter and, in parallel, worked closely with the CFO to develop new performance benchmarks and reporting based on targeted growth goals.
The implementation of the sales development function required the implementation of four new software tools and the integration of data with the CRM, warehouse and data routing tools. Since we are agnostic to tools or systems, we were able to accelerate this implementation and integration, despite our client using a non-standard CRM system.
Results
The combination of improved visibility on ecommerce channels and a corresponding improvement of focus and efficiency from the
inside sales team has led to year-over-year growth nearing 30%, which we achieved in less than 12 months.
Next steps are to further accelerate growth by working closely with the executive team to assess up to a dozen industry segments against product and services capabilities to align the organization (marketing, sales, customer success, product) to deliver higher-ticket, higher margin, full system solutions.
To learn more about the frameworks and templates we used during our engagement, visit our Go-to-Market Resources section.
