Here’s my first interview with Jim Willenborg, one of the major contributors to my book:
Bill Conifer: Much of the data and many of the meetings included Jim Willenborg we will now get the background on some of the chapters from Jim Willenborg.
I know we spent a lot of time together Jim, but I’m sure the readers of sales reps are free would love to hear the background and results of the company you and the other authors consultant with.
Jim Willenborg: Thanks Bill, I appreciate you having me on this consulting projects. They were very rewarding both, proving her concepts that salesman cause sales and sales reps are free. the rewarding part was that the company’s principals and the venture capitalist made millions while we got our consulting fee. I should’ve asked for stock. 🙂
Bill Conifer: one of my favorite stories is the educational hardware company. Can you give us some background on that Jim?
Jim Willenborg: Sure, this was a company with $35 million in revenue for the last 2 to 3 years and no growth. Their venture capital firm called us in to see if we could figure out how to get growth back on track so they may be able to go public or merge.
Bill Conifer: Stalled sales was one of your special things, right?
Jim Willenborg: Yes, and it was almost always caused by the fact they stopped hiring sales reps a couple years before they called us. In this situation, they had five sales reps, identical to almost every story in your book. They were selling educational hardware, essentially a rack of 30 computers that would be targeted at K-8 Elementary school students.
Bill Conifer: If I recall from my book, one of the sales reps at a giant territory.
Jim Willenborg: Yes, the Houston sales rep, their best sales rep, had essentially the Louisiana purchase as her territory. And to sell a system you usually have to make multiple sales calls on the school district and multiple sales calls on the state’s department of education.
Bill Conifer: That’s a giant piece of land. How do you even navigate it?
Jim Willenborg: You don’t. One of our team had the brilliant idea to plot her sales as a function of ZIP Code. The results were extremely interesting and influential.
The best salesman booking for $5 million a year in revenue, did not have a sale over 200 miles from Houston where she lived. She did not even have time to return phone calls from the other 20 states in her territory.
Bill Conifer: That’s a pretty good argument to add more sales reps.
Jim Willenborg: Yes, quite convincing. Here is a company with a large market, a very salable product, but the constraint to sales growth was the number of sales calls they had available.
Bill Conifer: The solution was obvious, just hire more sales reps.
Jim Willenborg: Yes, but salesman have to be managed so we took four of the five sales reps and promoted them, then we had each hire five new sales reps.
We replaced the salesman in the Northeast, since he wasn’t performing, with a new hire, and the company boomed.
Bill Conifer: Although it’s in the book, tell us the results of this consulting project?
Jim Willenborg: We forecast that sales would start going up in 12 to 18 months, since it was a complicated sale. In fact, sales went up to a 30 to 40% growth rate in only six months and the company went public in less than 12 months. A huge success.
As I point out to the founders, they each got $30 million in equity value growth, while our team, as you recall Bill, got $40,000 consulting fee.
Granted you have to have a great product and a large and growing market before adding sales reps with a good comp plan actually works, and they did all that, all we did was to say, “Hire more Reps.”
Bill Conifer: Thanks Jim, that’s the part of the story I wanted you to tell. We will be back with more interviews from the team over the coming weeks.
