Building Sales Organisation

Restructuring & Scaling the Sales Organisation

Background of the client

Our client is a bootstrapped startup focused on skilling and placing job seekers in overseas roles, with the goal of addressing the global shortage and imbalance of skilled labour. While the Indian government has made efforts to establish the country as a global skill capital, progress has been slow. Our client has seized the opportunity by reaching out proactively to international employers and bringing bulk job roles to India in industries such as healthcare, service, engineering, and food processing. However, in 2021, the company faced four major challenges that made it difficult to find the right candidates at a steady scale in their candidate-paid business model, despite having demand to hire over 1000 candidates.

What affected sales the most?

Sales structure before engagement

Despite securing significant orders from international clients, our client was still grappling with the supply puzzle. The team responsible for identifying suitable candidates and guiding them through the entire process, from the initial lead to arrival at the destination, was understaffed and lacked structure, with a total of 11 team members including the founders. Furthermore, all team members were being remotely managed directly by the CEO from London.

Starting-off our engagement

Our engagement began with an assessment of the challenges defined by the founders and the team, as well as an evaluation of the current sales processes, team capabilities, and available resources. The aim was to identify the necessary steps required to achieve the business goals. Some key insights were:

Some immediate actions that were put in place immediately to arrest the situation were:

Introduction of leadership at different levels

Master dashboards & DSR were introduced for data tracking

Morning meeting to establish a feedback loop

Created partnership/ channel sales vertical for reach and build on borrowed trust

Early success

The positive impact of the newly introduced processes was apparent, as the company achieved its highest business performance ever within the first month. Although there was an upward trend in overall sales and growth, it became apparent that scaling and achieving sustained growth would be challenging without implementing a clearly defined customer journey. Below is the outline of the process map.

The objective of the process map was to promote a trustworthy and satisfying customer experience by introducing transparency into the process. However, without a proper team, it would have been difficult to implement such a process.

As a result, our initial efforts involved restructuring the existing team and introducing new verticals to bolster both the sales process and the sales team. In order to tackle concerns regarding brand image, lead generation, automation, and data management, we overhauled the marketing department (click here to read the detailed case study on leveraging marketing and automation). Likewise, we established a sales operations department to address any challenges pertaining to the customer journey post-sign-up.
Additionally, we rolled out channel partner models to support our channel partnership team in parallel.

To enhance team efficiency and motivation, and to instil accountability at every stage, we introduced new key performance indicators (KPIs) with corresponding rewards and recognition. The implementation of daily stand-up meetings and weekly/monthly reviews further reinforced the team's efforts and contributed to an overall increase in performance.

With the team's performance beginning to stabilize, supported by a dedicated product department and valuable insights from data analysis to address the growing business of diverse clients, it was deemed appropriate to further scale up the team. A critical decision was made to assign job roles based on the executives' or channel partners' specific skill sets, shifting from an "open for all" to a category-wise sourcing approach. This approach also helped improve resource allocation and enabled better project management efficiency.

The team's capacity was evidently boosted by the organizational restructuring and scaling initiatives. This enabled us to implement numerous suggestions and ideas that drove growth. For instance, the addition of a channel manager brought more focus to the partnerships team, leading to improved engagement with institutional partners and government agencies. As a result, we were able to rely on borrowed trust and significantly reduce our overall customer acquisition cost (CAC). Moreover, we successfully executed an important strategic decision to launch partner training centres across major geographies of the southwest and northern parts of the country.

Here's a 1-min read on conclusion