If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it!!

‘If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’

This is a term we hear thrown around a lot in day-to-day life. If something is working well for you, why would you change it? 

Whilst I agree in principle, this mindset can also lead to complacency and before you know it, the things that were working before suddenly aren’t as effective. 

This was very much the position we were in 6 months ago. After a challenging 2020, 2021 was proving to be very successful for us, we were winning plenty of new clients, and expanding our team rapidly to ensure we could deliver everything we needed to the best of our ability. 

We had big growth plans for 2022 and beyond and we made a huge decision to re-structure our business and our operating procedures to see if we could improve on an already fantastic performance with our teams. 

So what changes did we make? 

 

Creating Teams 

We have always operated as one big team, reporting directly to the Operations Manager. We decided to split our employees into three teams. Each team would be multi-disciplined and would consist of admin & lead generators, sales executives and prospect conversion & customer development executives. This empowered our teams to work together to achieve one end goal, as well as building further team spirit and some friendly competitiveness amongst them. 

 

Hiring Team Leaders & Deputies 

We advertised and recruited team leaders to head up each team, as well as a strong Deputy Team Leader. We felt it was important for each newly formed team to have a clearly defined leader. As advocates of always trying to promote from within, we advertised internally and carried out a thorough interview process. We successfully hired team leaders and deputies for every team from our current employees. The newly appointed leaders have been both highly successful salespeople, but also had excellent people and coaching skills. 

 

Splitting our customer base 

We assigned each of our teams a group of customers that they had accountability for.  This meant that everything from lead generation to appointment setting and customer conversion was managed end to end by one group of people. This enabled us not only to provide continuity to our customers, but also to enable the team to truly become experts in their customers’ subject matter. It also empowered our teams to take accountability for the performance of these customer accounts by seeking advice from others and sharing the best practice in order to achieve success. 

 

So the burning question is…have all these changes made a difference? And the answer is yes- the improvements have been tenfold. 

By making these changes, the team have almost doubled their performance consistently in terms of the appointments being booked. Our customers enjoy having one point of contact and knowing the team responsible for their account on a first name basis, making the lines of communication much more efficient. 

All of the teams have a clear goal to work towards and have really formed strong bonds to deliver their best personally, and for their customers. They now received more tailored and focused support through regular coaching and 121s with their team leaders, ensuring that their needs are being met both personally and professionally! 

Has it had it’s challenges? Of course! As with all change, you do have to go through a period of pain as you adjust and people get used to the new normal, but I believe that if I asked any one of our team if they wanted to go back to the way in which we used to work, their answer would be ‘No Way!’