Reseller makeover: Sales training scores a bullseye

The before snapshot 

Carpe Diem

Initially a secondary school teacher, Bruce Rasmussen left a 10-year career of senior sales, marketing and general manage­ment in the IT industry in 2000 to start a management consulting firm that focused on strategic planning, marketing and sales effectiveness.

Sensing a need to dramatically improve sales skills to benefit both the buyer and seller, his firm formed a partnership with Microsoft in 2004 to deliver - on an interna­tional basis - courses and consultancies to implement a "solutions" approach to selling.

"When I ask many people to define 'sell­ing', they often say 'forcing people to buy products they don't need'. Clearly many people have been burned," he says.

"By teaching IT resellers to implement a sales process based on genuinely solving customers' business problems, I've found a way to help these companies differenti­ate themselves from the pack, and really improve their customers' businesses.

"Hopefully my efforts make selling seem a valuable profession - not a refuge for poorly trained, over-paid, non-creators of value."

Bullseye

Bullseye is the result of a merger between Bullseye Digital, RAN ONE and iFocus in 2008. It then bought SydneyWeb, an SME online services provider.

Before the training, the company was still operating as three separate businesses, and its approach to answering proposals to customers was unstructured.

Every time it pitched for business it was a bespoke effort, says CEO Jim McKerlie. This led to inefficiencies and a disjointed business proposition and brand image - as one person would present Bullseye in one way, another would put forward a different picture.

It also meant the company was responding to a lot of briefs, but the success rate was lower than desired, because it did not qualify the opportunity and was racing against the clock to submit on time.

"Not only were we reinventing the wheel with each proposal, we also identified that we were responding to too many pitches," says McKerlie.

"We felt obliged to respond, rather than qualifying the opportunity to ascertaining whether it was the right fit for our business.

"Before the training, we were too product focused," says McKerlie.

"Our method of selling was to tell the prospect what we could offer, rather than ascertaining what their specific problems were and providing the right solution.

"We felt it was important to demon­strate our capability and what we had done elsewhere - but in doing so we didn't listen to what the prospect was really saying to us," he adds.

The afterwards look

Having developed the Bullseye Way in conjunction with Rasmussen, McKerlie says it has remedied the majority of issues it faced. The Bullseye Way consists of three principles:

1. How we sell

Our people now think and sell in solu­tion-based terms. Our approach is more consultative than it was before. We take the time to fully understand what our clients' pain points are, and respond with a solution that effectively takes the pain away.

2. How we manage client expectations

As a result of our training, we communicate more effectively with our clients. We guide the client through the process of delivering their project; they know what to expect from us through every stage of the process, and they know what we expect from them to complete the job within the set parameters.

3. What we do

We now sell our services based on the prob­lems we solve, rather than the attributes of our products. The clarity we now have around "what we do" gives us the ability to qualify opportunities and decide whether they are right for us. This has given us a clear vision, and has facilitated a shift towards a more unified Bullseye as everyone better understands what we do.