Case Study: Food Sector
Sales Leadership

The Challenge

This client is a food manufacturer operating a global business. When TLSA became involved, the client was in the middle of a strategic plan designed to achieve challenging growth objectives.

Leadership development was identified as critical to delivering the growth targets. One of the key challenges was to establish a ‘Sales Director: Executive Sales Leader’ group with the capability and potential to deliver on a country-by-country basis.

The Solution

TLSA designed a programme delivered over 9 months that featured:

• Psychometric Profiling: a normative assessment was used to analyse for each participant the cognitive and behavioral skills that are critical for strategic sales leadership roles. Strengths and development areas were identified and then linked to personalised development plans.
• Sales Director Programme: delivered over a 9-month period the programme featured:
• Strategic Sales Leadership based on TLSA’s ‘The Sales Director’ ready to go programme
• Leading the Sales Team: that tactical side of sales leadership focused on developing and leading high performing sales teams
• One to One Coaching: integrating face to face and online coaching sessions. Each participant was supported with one-to-one coaching.

This initial programme evolved into a full programme of sales development that covered:

• Sales Cycle Structure
• Consultative Selling
• Negotiation Skills
• Sales Capability Profiling.

Results

This programme evolved into a two-year assignment which produced results in:

• Sales Leadership: the sales directors work as a leadership team to implement a motivational and consistent approach to leadership driven by strategic objectives and a customer-focused value proposition. This in turn impacted on the leadership and management performance of first and second-line managers in the sales function
• Business Performance: improved sales skills and processes from the sales team, combined with motivational leadership acted as a catalyst for growth and achievement of revenue objectives
• Business Environment: the sales function became a better place to work. Initially, this was seen in the retention of top-performing sales despite competitor approaches, evolving to the point that the business began to attract top performers. It became the ‘Go To’ business to work for.