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Case Study

Enhanc­ing sales effec­tive­ness and rev­enue growth in agri­cul­tur­al man­u­fac­tur­ing — with­in just 10 weeks

2023/03/31

Back­ground

The agri­cul­tur­al man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try involves the pro­duc­tion of equip­ment and machin­ery used in agri­cul­tur­al oper­a­tions, such as trac­tors, com­bines, irri­ga­tion sys­tems, and oth­er farm imple­ments. The indus­try is close­ly tied to the over­all health of the agri­cul­ture sec­tor, which is affect­ed by a range of fac­tors, includ­ing weath­er, com­mod­i­ty prices, trade poli­cies, and tech­nol­o­gy advancements.

Our client is a lead­ing man­u­fac­tur­er of elec­tric fence sys­tems, live­stock scales, elec­tron­ic iden­ti­fi­ca­tion prod­ucts and milk meter­ing equip­ment for farm­ers in over 100 coun­tries. They have been design­ing, man­u­fac­tur­ing and mar­ket­ing prod­ucts and solu­tions to increase effi­cien­cy and prof­itabil­i­ty in the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor since 1964.

The Chal­lenge

Although the client’s retail sales team had been achiev­ing its annu­al tar­gets, they want­ed to improve fur­ther. After a detailed analy­sis, we dis­cov­ered that:

  1. Area sales man­agers were large­ly self-directed, with min­i­mal guid­ance from nation­al man­agers for sales pro­duc­tiv­i­ty tar­gets. This led to incon­sis­tent stan­dards of effec­tive activ­i­ties dur­ing sales visits.
  2. Dai­ly activ­i­ties between sales man­agers, retail key accounts and high-value end users also lacked vis­i­bil­i­ty, increas­ing the risk of ser­vice inefficiencies.
  3. The cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM) sys­tem was also under-utilised, pro­vid­ing lit­tle vis­i­bil­i­ty of the sales activ­i­ty history
  4. There was low vis­i­bil­i­ty on the time tak­en up for prod­uct trou­bleshoot­ing and oth­er non-value-adding impairments
  5. There was a need for bet­ter key lead indi­ca­tors that could be man­aged to max­imise month­ly sales performance

Project Approach

In order to eval­u­ate the cur­rent state of sales per­for­mance and iden­ti­fy poten­tial areas for improve­ment, Renoir and the com­pa­ny worked togeth­er to:

  1. Con­duct inter­views across the orga­ni­za­tion to cap­ture sys­temic gaps in the plan­ning and report­ing used to con­trol sales performance
  2. Iden­ti­fy best prac­tices used across the sales team
  3. Cre­at­ed a cross-functional Man­age­ment Action Team (MAT) to ensure resources were prop­er­ly man­aged and pro­posed changes were suc­cess­ful­ly implemented
  4. Hold pre­sen­ta­tions and field coach­ing with sales man­agers to ensure the suc­cess­ful uptake of these new oper­a­tional changes

Based on the results of the analy­sis, we kick­start­ed 20-week project to track the sales activ­i­ties across the company’s retail chains. The project was split into three stages:

Project Imple­men­ta­tion

  1. OPTIMISING PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFICIENCY
    Stores in the sales ter­ri­to­ries were eval­u­at­ed and clas­si­fied accord­ing to his­tor­i­cal sales and growth poten­tial. Var­i­ous KPIs and report­ing mea­sures were imple­ment­ed to man­age sales pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and sales tar­gets, while also iden­ti­fy­ing indi­vid­ual stores that had not been vis­it­ed with­in the tar­get cycle.


    The result of this was a “Best Prac­tices” toolk­it that includ­ed train­ing and pro­mo­tion­al sum­maries to show his­tor­i­cal sales trends for indi­vid­ual stores, increase employ­ee prod­uct knowl­edge, and give a check­list that cov­ers all key sales dri­vers. 

    Results of the check­list were matched against store month-on-month sales to ensure that the new sales activ­i­ties were deliv­er­ing improved results. Clear guide­lines were estab­lished to man­age min­i­mum expec­ta­tions, and suc­cess­ful tac­tics were reg­u­lar­ly shared in the fort­night­ly sales con­fer­ence call. This val­i­da­tion process ensured con­tin­u­ous eval­u­a­tion of sales process and behav­iours to dri­ve ongo­ing sales effectiveness.

  2. IMPROVING REPORTING AND BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
    Report­ing sys­tems were devel­oped and inte­grat­ed into the exist­ing CRM sys­tem to mon­i­tor and ver­i­fy data integri­ty. As a result, sum­maries of sales vis­its – and its cor­re­spond­ing dash­boards – could be updat­ed in real time through mobile solu­tions.


    Reports now also fac­tored in KPIs that were pre­vi­ous­ly not mon­i­tored to give clear vis­i­bil­i­ty of mar­ket demand. The report­ing cas­cad­ed more detail from all lev­els of man­age­ment, with the appro­pri­ate KPIs being includ­ed for each lev­el of account­abil­i­ty in the organisation.

    Sales man­agers now had access to more infor­ma­tion of indi­vid­ual store per­for­mance, lead­ing to an increase in the effec­tive­ness of their dis­cus­sions with sales staff, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of oppor­tu­ni­ties for sales growth. In this way, the Sales Man­age­ment Con­trol Sys­tem (SMCS) could be used con­stant­ly to mon­i­tor per­for­mance effec­tive­ly, ensur­ing a sus­tain­able improvement.

Results

After 20 weeks, the fol­low­ing results were achieved.

10% 

Improve­ment in increased sales meetings 

50% 

Improve­ment in sales-visit effectiveness 

$425,000

Annu­alised ben­e­fits with­in 10 weeks of implementation 

$900,000

Pro­ject­ed annu­alised benefits 

Addi­tion­al­ly, the sales approach also under­went an upgrade. With the SMCS, sales man­agers now had access to bet­ter met­rics for plan­ning and a method of deliv­er­ing sus­tained sales ben­e­fits to the busi­ness. In short, the SMCS becomes a method to mon­i­tor per­for­mance effec­tive­ly and dri­ve con­tin­u­ous, sus­tain­able improvement.

CONCLUSION

With­in the short time­frame of the project, we man­aged to help the client achieve a sig­nif­i­cant rise in sales vol­ume and mar­gin, creaing the frame­work for con­tin­u­ous improve­ment to deliv­er fur­ther increases.

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