Case Study

A leading Singapore-based pest management business returns to profitability by redesigning their sales operations strategy

After a generational leadership change, a family-owned pest management business was struggling to modernize their sales operations, and inaccurate data and outdated practices were starting to negatively affect the company's profitability. Working with the Managing Director, we led three key sales operations initiatives - we redesigned the company's sales forecasting process, restructured the sales compensation plan to better incentive the sales reps, and realigned the CRM sales process to better meet the needs of the sales team. For the next two consecutive years, the business recorded over 110% sales achievement and returned to sustained profitability.

The Full Story

The Situation

A family-owned pest management business, with 60+ vehicles and 120+ staff, was trying to modernize their sales operations strategy.

For years they relied on manual sales reporting, which tended to conflict with data coming from the pest manager's CRM and finance systems. Additionally, sales forecasting tended to be very subjective and inaccurate. With no clearly defined sales stages, deals were forecasted primarily based on the instinct of the sales manager rather than on objective criteria.

This was reflected in PestCo’s* stagnating revenue. While sales was steadily growing for the past 3 years, revenue remained flat over the same time period and profitability had fallen below zero. With pressure mounting to return the business to profitability, the Managing Director needed to fix the disconnect between sales and revenue.

Our Approach

Together with senior management, we designed an engagement to address these challenges. The engagement involved three steps:

Change the CRM sales stages to better categorize leads/opportunities.

Overhaul the sales forecasting process to improve reporting accuracy and drive objectivity in individual deal reviews.

Restructure the sales compensation plan to re-align sales incentivization with management priorities.

The Results

1

Higher Sales: The sales team recorded two consecutive years of sales achievement above 110%, the first year being the first time in 5 years the company had overachieved its sales targets.

2

Increased Contract Revenue: With a renewed focus on the importance of contract revenue to improving customer LTV, the sales team sold more new contracts and recorded higher contract renewal rates than at any time in the past 3 years.

3

Workforce Optimization: By improving sales forecasting accuracy, the Managing Director was able to better allocate her field resources, thus improving profitability in an industry with constant manpower constraints.

*We take our client’s confidentiality seriously. While we’ve changed their names, the results are real.

The sales team broke all previous records of sales they had closed for the years prior, and I think a large part of that came down to the training and the guidance from SAGE.

- Managing Director of PestCo*