L-3 Communications Infrared Products is the manufacturer of the Thermal-Eye and NIGHTDRIVER technology. The company's products are high quality, uncooled infrared camera cores and finished products. These thermal imaging cameras and the core technology are used in firefighting, security applications, industrial machine vision and preventative maintenance applications, public safety/law enforcement and automotive applications.

Russ Camacho, director of sales at the time, was a seasoned professional who recognized that sales success is based on the understanding of the customers' needs and the ability to address those specific needs through his company's product offering.

The primary goal of Camacho and his management team was to improve corporate and channel sales performance through the implementation of a sales process that represented the best sales practices of L-3 Communications.

The challenges they faced in achieving this goal were:

• Each reseller had their 'own' sales process, making it difficult for territory managers to provide the skill and opportunity coaching necessary to upgrade their selling skills and sales effectiveness.
• In many cases, the reseller's sales people spent a great deal of time selling to a single, sometimes low-level, individual who didn't have the power to make a purchase decision.
• The majority of sales people were comfortable talking about and showing the features of the Thermal-Eye product, but often neglected talking about how the product could be used to cost effectively achieve operational and safety goals and the associated value.
• The lack of a consistent sales process made it very difficult to prepare an accurate sales forecast, which in turn made it difficult to plan manufacturing production.

The capabilities that Camacho said he needed were:

• A consistent, repeatable 'sales process' that: reseller's can be taught to execute; territory managers can monitor, coach and inspect; and that represents L-3's most effective/best sales practices.
• The ability to leverage any point of entry to obtain access to other executives who will be directly impacted by the selection and use of Thermal-Eye product capabilities, in order to create a sense of urgency and create additional value to the organization.
• Sales tools/questioning templates that combine application and product 'usage' knowledge, by job title, that allow sales people to converse and diagnose an executives' operational and safety issues with a bias toward the capabilities found in the Thermal-Eye product.
• A consistent pipeline grading system that allowed management to prepare a sales forecast and calculate the probability of closing the sale based on progress through the new sales process.

CustomerCentric Selling® provided L-3 Communications with these capabilities.

After conducting a customized CustomerCentric Selling® workshop with selected resellers, territory managers and vertical market managers, Gary Walker (CustomerCentric Selling® co-founder) worked with Camacho to determine the results of his sales process implementation initiative.

According to Camacho, results included:

• Improved 30 day forecast accuracy from 50 percent to 95 percent.
• Improved 60 day forecast accuracy from non-existent to 82 percent.
• Increased sales performance of the total channel to 140 percent of YTD quota by mid-year.
• Increased number of resellers who exceeded their YTD sales quotas from seven at the end of the first quarter to 15 by the end of the second quarter.

When asked to comment on the improved performance, Camacho said, "The combination of the right management team, armed with and consistently using the CustomerCentric Selling® sales process, is enormously powerful for driving top line results. For all the members of my team, this is becoming absolutely integral to how we manage our sales channel and how we sell. It's how we drive this train, and it works."

To learn more about Thermal-Eye product, visit www.Thermal-Eye.com.

Published by Bizlogx, LLC.
Copyright © 2006