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Details
- What: BellSouth wanted to increase revenue generated by its account team
Key measures: Sales/day, Sales of strategic products/day, Account Team Awareness, Account
Team Effectiveness, Awards and Recognition Program Effectiveness, Customer Satisfaction.
- Who: Account team
- Where: Georgia
- How Long: 4 months (includes 4 weeks of testing)
- How: Six Sigma Approach
- Why: Revenue increase of 10% would mean an additional $10M in revenue
Collect Ideas: Ideas were collected from all account teams concerning “What could we do differently to increase sales?”
Ideas Tested/Time Frame: The ideas were reduced to 14 testable ideas. All 14 were tested at the same time for a period of 4 weeks. Only 3 were significantly helpful to increase sales, 3 hurt sales, 8 made no difference.
To our surprise we found that our current incentives to sell were decreasing sales rather than enhancing sales. Sales managers realized that they needed to provide more structure and discipline around making pro-active visits.
Some of the ideas tested: Complete a sales planner for each customer, ask “how do you share information between locations?”, send a letter before the sales visit, place a follow-up phone call after the visit.
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