You’re the Boss Blog: Why I Am Not Going to Renew the Sales Consultant

Laura Pedrick for The New York Times Was the sales consultant worth the money to Paul Downs (above)?

Staying Alive

The struggles of a business trying to survive.

Editor’s note: Paul Downs is writing this week about his decision to hire a sales consultant. The series started with this post.

A year has gone by, and I need to decide whether to renew my sales consultant’s contract. If I do, we will continue with two coaching sessions per month, one for me individually that will focus on my role as sales manager and the other a group meeting with my three sales representatives. Both sessions will be with the consultant, Bob Waks. For this, he wants $12,000. Is this a good value?

To answer that question, I need to first ask whether I got my money’s worth in the first year of consulting. I spent $37,000 for initial evaluations, a course in the Sandler Method, and ongoing evaluations. And after participating in all of that, I got the results I wanted. We have exceeded our sales target in every quarter since we started the training. In the first half of 2012, before training, we sold $865,274. In the second half of 2012, after starting the training, we sold $1,236,864. And this year, as of June 15, we had sold $1,218,414.

So for me, hiring a consultant worked. Here are some of the things that went right:

• I found my consultant by taking a recommendation from a colleague, Sam Saxton, who had had good results in a similar situation.

• The consultant had experience working with companies the size of mine, and he relies on referrals to keep busy. He had both the means and the motives to make our project a success.

• We had an easily identifiable problem, and the services we were offered were a good solution. All the way through, Mr. Waks explained exactly how he was going to address our issues, and it all made sense to me.

• We put a lot of effort into implementing the training we received. Everyone in my company knew from the beginning that we were in trouble, and I made it clear that this was going to be the solution and that I was behind the effort 100 percent. At the beginning, this took some faith in Mr. Waks’s skills, but the recommendations I had received were enough to build my own confidence. I put considerable effort into building up the information systems that would support our new sales method, both by writing new code in our database and by building spreadsheets (in Google Docs) that gave us a much more detailed look at incoming call patterns. These have been invaluable in identifying what type of client is calling us and in helping us identify those customers most likely to buy.

• We received ongoing evaluation and training. Our monthly meetings, over the course of a year, were critically important. They allowed us to get feedback as we adapted the broad ideas of the Sandler Method to our own world. Mr. Waks helped us figure out exactly how we should respond to particular situations. And the one-on-one sessions that I had with him were useful as well. He provided good advice as I puzzled through the implementation of the new system.

The best result for me, other than hitting our numbers, was to free up a lot of my time by allowing me to ease out of the sales role. Selling was my primary job for many, many years, and it took up most of the hours of my day. I now have more confidence that my sales people can hit their quotas, and I no longer feel the need to jump into the thick of things to save us. This has allowed me to spend more time analyzing the whole business, and it let me put into place a large number of improvements in communications and operations. It even gave me the opportunity to go back out on the shop floor and build some furniture for the first time since 1992. (I’ll be writing more about that.)

So will I renew the consultant’s contract? My decision is to hold off for now. Our steady stream of new orders has revealed some weaknesses in our production capacity, and I’d prefer to spend my cash addressing those issues. Also, I want to see if we can take what we have learned and implement the lessons on an ongoing basis without outside help. My main goal for the company this year is to set up ongoing processes, with data gathering and regular meetings, so that we can continually evaluate and improve our performance. It may be counter-intuitive, because people complain about it so much, but I feel that we need more bureaucracy. In large companies, organization can be stultifying. In my tiny company, where chaos has been the norm, my goal is to add routines, here and there, until we aren’t constantly reacting to disasters but rather making orderly plans for the future.

This leaves the question of whether I will recognize the next opportunity to get outside help and improve my situation. What’s a good way to figure out where we are weak? Should numbers be the only consideration? Or are there areas where most businesses could benefit from hiring a consultant?

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/why-i-am-not-going-to-renew-the-sales-consultant/?partner=rss&emc=rss