Commercial excellence program for service business
Case study:
Commercial excellence program for service business
- Situation
- Country organization of a global service company struggled to grow its topline
- Sales force effectiveness lagged group standards: low productivity, high churn, few successful new joiners, downward spiral
- Fragile growth engine with high hiring volumes, weak activation and recurring clean-ups hurting morale and data quality
- Actions
- Analyzed five-year cohorts and locations to isolate root causes and scalable growth levers across recruitment, leadership, performance management and sales execution
- Tightened hiring funnel with clear qualification criteria, persona-based sourcing, structured interviews, earlier operations involvement with veto rights, and recruiter bonuses tied to downstream success
- Shifted area managers from closers to coaches with incentives on leading KPIs like activation and lead growth, guided by a competency framework, onboarding-to-activation checklists and weekly performance routines, backed by benchmarking and consequence management
- Simplified sales steering and established transparency via a unified dashboard from CEO to rep, leads as the core metric with tenure-based targets and early activation bonuses, plus quarterly clean-ups and soft logouts to keep the base productive and data reliable
- Introduced and deployed field coaches to build leadership depth, bridge Sales and Operations, deliver micro-trainings and address performance issues
- Professionalized lead processes end-to-end with clear SLAs, performance-based allocation, systematic recycling of dormant leads, systematic handover after sales representative churn and shifted spend to higher-quality seller channels
- Results
- New sales organization with clear roles, incentives and accountability established
- Overall potential sales increase of 25% p.a. identified due to
- Higher early activation achieved and sharply lower projected new-joiner churn
- Substantial new sales representative growth due to lower churn
- >100% more leads per new rep in the first six months
- >50% sales representative productivity upside
- Culture reset from firefighting to data-driven performance
- Country positioned for sustainable growth and market share gains