“When you’re working with sales organizations, the good news is that they’re motivated and hard charging. The bad news is that they cannot identify what’s working for them and what is not. George is able to take the best of sales and create a plan that the team says YES to and then hold them accountable to that plan.

Insightful and committed, George has an OD perspective while having a thorough understanding of sales people. His ability to work within an organization without creating more conflict is a very good skill to have.”

—Sandra Cavanaugh
Managing Director, Private Client Services, Russell Investments

When do you need Gimbal Systems?

No one likes to encounter any of the following issues. But problems can become opportunities for growth and success, especially when you partner with people who know how to leverage such challenges as these:

1. You’re not seeing the sales results you had planned for

2. You’re experiencing inconsistent sales performance across the organization

3. You’re hearing negative feedback from your customers

4. You’re implementing a sales process that is not being adopted by your sales people

5. You’re considering a new approach to your company’s sales process

6. Your top sales people are leaving or you are attracting the wrong type of sales people

7. You’re losing out to the competition even though you have a superior product, pricing, and people

8. You’re re-branding your company and you want to ensure that you can deliver on the promise of your sales process

9. Your market is changing and you may not be

10. You are the current market leader and you want to proactively explore what is next.

How you will benefit from working with Gimbal Systems

You benefit from a more consistent, aligned sales process that delivers increased revenue, more successful sales professionals and happier customers. You get the sales results you have wanted with the peace of mind that the behaviors taken to get them are sound and aligned with your brand and values. Along the way you partner with someone that has a fresh perspective and that you can talk to in complete confidence throughout the journey.

Gimbal Systems is a partner you can trust. We blend proven sales experience with applied behavioral science knowledge to bring a unique perspective to each customer engagement. We work to understand what success means to your sales organization from multiple perspectives, the company, the salesperson and the customer. Our collaborative process forces a truly customized implementation by focusing on and enhancing what is working well in order to leverage the identified strengths as much as possible. Our “Calibrating for Success” process proceeds as follows:

1. Define Project Success: What are you or your organization trying to accomplish or change?
   1. Identify key metrics to measure (i.e. units sold, customer loyalty, etc.)
   2. Establish a baseline to track progress against for key metrics
   3. What does success look like?
   4. What are the consistent behaviors you want in place?
2. Identify: Determine what a successful sale is for the company, salesperson and customer.
   1. Find out who is currently making successful sales
   2. How do you know?
   3. What are they doing to create success?
3. Understand: Bring unconscious competence to consciousness.
   1. Observe and interview top, middle and bottom performers
   2. Build competency models and sales process to support proven best practices
4. Test Solutions: Pilot to ensure the newly defined process is working and providing the intended results for the company, salespeople and customers.

5. Build Support to Sustain Success: Evaluate and develop the following to reinforce new behaviors.

   1. Training Programs
   2. Performance Management, Compensation and Employee Lifecycle
   3. Change Management Programs

Gimbal Systems focuses on two business principles

The first principle is the distribution curve, which is used to help display the variations of results (standard deviations) from the mean result. In most sales organizations, this distribution exists in some shape or form when considering top, middle and bottom performers. The X axis is the production per employee and the Y axis is number of employees.

The next is the Pareto principle, also known as the 80-20 rule, which states for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., “80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients or sales people.”

Gimbal Systems specialty is focusing in on the top end of the distribution curve and the 20% within any sales organization. Our goal in working with clients is to understand what is making those top producers successful within your organization. We want to confirm that they are truly delivering the sales experience you want provided to your customers instead of just putting numbers on the board for the sake of production. Once we are able to determine what they are doing unconsciously to be at the top of their game while consistently delivering a great customer experience, we then work to build on their identified strengths. It is this is “Calibrating for Success” process that allows organizations to ultimately shift their distribution curve to the right while broadening the number of successful producers to achieve more consistent and predictable results across the sales organization.
 

Numbers Matter

Example return on investment (ROI) business case to demonstrate this point:

A sales force of 10 people is producing $100K in revenues. Top 20% are producing $80K, the remaining 80% are only producing $20K. What if you could move those 8 salespeople’s production to $80K? You would have $160K in total revenue or a 60% increase assuming the top producers continued their success. Better yet, what if the 80% could eventually match the top producers? Now you have $400K in total revenues by focusing on and leveraging the behaviors that are working to make the results more predictable, measurable, repeatable and scalable.