Advantage Success Case: Pacific Pulmonary Services
What You Need: Make sure the team stays on track.
Successful sales is an art, a discipline, and a science. We provide sales processes that not only structure in accountability, but also teach the team to engage in the practices of successful selling – planning, hiring, coaching, and forecasting — on a consistent basis.
Issues You’re Facing
- No consistent sales management process or use of best practices
- Ad hoc sales coaching
- Sales performance isn’t up to expectation
- High turnover
- Sales training hasn’t created meaningful improvement
How We Can Help
- Create consistent sales management practices
- Achieve top-line growth targets
- Generate more revenue per sale
- Sell to higher levels
- Create more customer value
- Enhance sales management coaching
- Grow/protect existing account relationships
ADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS: The Advantage WaySM, HR Chally Talent Audit; Symphony; Best Match; Custom sales management operating system; Custom new hire training and onboarding program; Custom questioning, listening, coaching, and leadership skills programs.
Want to Transform Your Sales Team? Start Over, Stay Persistent and Reap Great Rewards
Pacific Pulmonary Services was serious about transforming its sales organization. What was the result of their commitment, persistence, and hard choices? World-class, industry-leading sales performance, that’s what.
Challenge
PPS is the country’s fifth-largest home respiratory therapy company. It serves patients from more than 141 local and centralized care centers in more than 20 states. The company serves local physicians to provide in-home oxygen, respiratory medication, and sleep therapy to more than 120,000 patients.
In mid-2007, the sales model that PPS had used to grow the business from $1 million to nearly $100 million had hit a plateau. Turnover was high and growing. The sales team was overly dependent on the production of a few sales stars. The approach to managing the sales organization was entrepreneurial and lacked goal alignment. Although sales results were acceptable, PPS leaders knew that the sales organization lacked the consistency, performance expectations, and accountability to grow the business. Without a major change, it was clear that PPS would not be able to rise to the level required to thrive in the highly competitive, cost-containment healthcare environment.
CEO Christopher Kane realized, “The approach to selling that had been highly effective in our former stage of evolution simply wasn’t working now that the business was so large. We knew we needed to make some changes.”
Success Solution
Advantage Partner and cofounder John Hoskins was asked to help build a blueprint for an initiative that would take the PPS sales organization where it needed to go. The first order of business: Get senior managers across the organization to buy into the idea that the PPS sales organization needed to be — and would become — world-class. “We had to agree that becoming a world-class sales organization was a strategic initiative,” says Kane. “And that it would give us, despite the changes in the regulatory and payment environment, a sustainable strategic advantage.”
Advantage and PPS focused on sales management development first, then hiring and candidate selection. The next step was to put a sales management process in place. Training for the sales team came later.
“Your sales management process can’t support world-class results unless it rests upon a firm foundation,” Hoskins explains. “PPS laid that foundation by making sure they were bringing the right people into the organization, and sales managers had a consistent way to coach and measure performance. At that point, we were certain the sales management piece was right, and we started to see early results.” To make sure learning achieved true business impact, The Advantage WaySM process was foundational to the entire initiative.
The three-year PPS sales transformation initiative included a broad range of solutions: A new sales management operating system gave sales people at every level a consistent way to conduct their activities, plus a process with key metrics they could use to drive sales. A sales force Talent Audit from HR Chally assessed competencies of sales and customer service reps, and the profiles that resulted helped managers properly place, develop, coach, and retain salespeople. The audit results and profiles were also used to create a New Hire Training Orientation and Onboarding program.
PPS Managers’ ability to lead was transformed via a series of customized learning programs. Managers improved they way they assessed, planned, and managed individual and team performance after experiencing the BTS Symphony program. Hoskins and his team also created questioning and listening skills modules for managers; as well as selection skills, coaching skills, and project management training. The BTS Best Match approach formed the core of an interviewing skills program.
The sales team transformation also impacted how field sales people achieved goals. A field improvement and coaching initiative used a customized Porter Henry SalesAbility model to plan and conduct better sales calls. “Ride-alongs” were created to help managers coach sales reps on-site, and Impact Maps (an Advantage Way tool) were used by both parties to evaluate and debrief sales call success.
The PPS transformation that began in the sales organization expanded to other areas of the company. For example, headquarters managers and supervisory staffs were trained in a new coaching and development model, and operations managers used e-learning to re-charge their leadership skills.
Today, the productivity of PPS salespeople is higher than that of any other company in the industry — by far. Turnover has dropped by more than half. Salespeople are overachieving their quotas. PPS salespeople receive outstanding training and development, and are led by a professional sales management group.
CEO Kane explains, “We really did a comprehensive overhaul of our sales organization. We changed how we hire, screen, manage, train, and compensate. Taken together and done well collectively, these changes have made a tremendously positive impact on the business.” Moreover, PPS expects that the great results from their sales transformation will just keep getting better. “One of the powerful things that John Hoskins and his organization help companies do is to build in continuous improvement,” says Kane. “If you really stick with the process — and can refine, improve, and tailor it to your company over time — you just get better and better and better. That’s incredibly powerful.”
