Sourcing for Sales Leader to Lead Expansion Initiative

Bob Lamoreaux, President, Waytek

The Challenge:
The company wanted to resume its 12 percent annual growth rate after three years of stagnating and declining revenue. It determined that fortifying its sales effort required a proactive initiative.

What did you want help with?
“We wanted to reverse three years of flat or lower revenues. Waytek is a catalog and web-based organization, providing outstanding customer service, but only dabbling in sales. We didn’t have a truly organized effort. In order to restructure and reinforce our sales initiative, we understood we needed to establish accountability.

“I realized we needed outside help, beyond what a recruiter offered and looked to SGS. I had heard Danita speak and was impressed with her insight and I had several professional recommendations about SGS.”

How did SGS help you?

“In three words—assessment, recruiting, hiring. They recommended an assessment of the current sales staff to help us reorganize sales and train staff and determine if we needed to look outside of the company for a director of sales. No one on our sales team had sales management acumen for building the kind of sales environment we wanted.

“SGS helped us drill down to all the requirements we needed for a sales manager who would be successful in our environment, and understand what we could expect from a hire. With their help, we created new job descriptions for account managers and a new customer acquisition position.

“They led the way in helping us create a sales culture of accountability, systematizing our effort by setting up measurements and goals for all sales activities. Their suggestions were right on for helping us create a compensation structure that would incentivize for growth.

“Assessing candidates to pre-qualify them was extremely helpful and saved me from wasting my time interviewing candidates who couldn’t possibly execute the company’s sales strategy.”

How would you describe the advantages of working with SGS?
“SGS brought us fresh, new perspectives. One of those was the assessment tool and how it exposed weaknesses that are connected with potential problems and areas that require additional coaching, which they are also helping us with.

“In contrast to recruiters we’ve previously worked with, SGS tests all worthy candidates before the interview. Really, why interview them if their weaknesses will make them unsuccessful. They demonstrated sensitivity to our particular needs with a mix of candidates and detailed follow-up. I would recommend SGS to anyone looking for recruiting help.”

Are you pleased with the outcomes?
“This quarter was our sales manager’s first, and quarterly revenues are up 25 percent over the same quarter last year. Honestly though, it’s too early to really judge his performance. He has realigned our current staff, revised compensation, and is still working on establishing the new sales culture of accountability.

“However, I will say that SGS did a nice job of giving us a broad base of candidates to evaluate. We chose someone from a call center environment, but we had excellent choices.”