The organisation

More than 1200 car dealerships in the UK rely on Cooper Solution’s services and software to run their businesses effectively. From efficient on-line auction for trade-in cars, to intelligent insight into dealership finances, Coopers lead the way. With a broad product range, built by people from the industry, Cooper solution’s products are highly regarded and provide excellent financial benefits to clients.

The challenge

The organisation had grown rapidly with a significant sized client facing team. Account managers delivered great client service, and retention of clients was high. Moving forward, the challenge was how to cross-sell Cooper’s other products, and also how to keep growth going as more people came on board. Without any historical sales processes and ways of working, the organisation needed to clarify its most effective sales routines and practices, and ensure new joiners picked these ways of working up.

The solution

Selling Interaction’s main role was to help management codify what best practices already existed in terms of sales, inject more from our sales best practices database, and install habits and behaviours across the account managers.

Via short workshops, interview, and best practices, we quickly developed “sales DNA” appropriate to the selling environment of Cooper Solutions. This included a unique sales process for software / service introduction into car dealerships, a simple account management model and training modules for cross selling 6 core products.

Using a phased training programme of 8 half days over 8 months, backed up and coached by management, the sales DNA became part of everyday behaviour, resulting in a significant shift in sales approach.

The Results

Two key shifts in behaviour drove much of the results. Traditionally, sales had been built on product demonstrations, showing the features of the system. The new sales DNA placed a heavy emphasis on active listening, (see You tube video) skilled questioning, and getting to the heart of the dealership’s operational issues. In addition, slowing down the sales process, so that a better case for the value of Cooper Solution’s products could be made, resulted in fewer rejections due to “not relevant, not urgent” type objections.

Participants were surveyed 8 months after the programme began, and demonstrated new revenues equivalent to 11.5 times the programme investment during that period.

Video from sponsors

The Next steps

Selling Interactions is working on the next wave of the sales DNA programme, which involves strengthening internal coaching capability, further developing account managers in terms of business case selling and optimising KPIs to connect with the sales strategy. The future is bright at Cooper Solutions!