The organisation

Trusted with critical international logistics solutions for a substantial proportion of the world’s top organisations, Spring GDS is a true industry leader. With its HQ in Den Haag, the company has a global sales team consisting of experts in their fields who are responsible for managing critical client relationships.

The challenge

With seismic shifts in the logistics landscape thanks to the e-commerce’s relentless development, the traditional mail market is diminishing. This places a stress on sales teams globally to win new opportunities and hold on to existing client relations.

In a complex global sales organisation, knowing where to start work to become fit for the future is challenging. And, how is the best way to sequence activities to increase sales fitness?

The solution

Selling Interactions initially conducted a “sales health check” using its Sales DNA and the Sales Excellence Diagnostic©, a sales best practice survey covering 97 points, which enabled Spring to prioritise where to focus sales efforts. Coupled with a “revenue engine analysis“, a programme was developed to focus activities in 6 work streams, including key account planning, sales process improvement and best practice exchange.

Each of the 6 work streams was led by a member of the Spring GDS team and was supervised by Selling Interactions, to achieve international best practice sharing, ownership and focus. This culminated in a comprehensive programme of training, implementation coaching and sales activities to boost revenues. Custom training programmes were developed in 6 languages and delivered by Selling Interaction’s international training team.

The Results

6 months into the programme, an ROI analysis survey was conducted among the 55 programme participants, with the following results:

1. Behaviour change – The most common themes were improved preparation, listening, and use of the sales process, sales planning and precise questioning.
2. New business – 8 new accounts, 3 old accounts reactivated, 1 account under threat retained, increased profit margin at 6 accounts, 2 new opportunities at existing accounts.
3. Increased revenues – Over 4 times the programme investment were recorded in extra revenues in the first 6 months, directly attributed to the new selling approach.

The Next steps

Today, Selling Interactions continues to help Spring GDS to develop an online sales academy. This will enable enhanced cross-selling through better product knowledge, and by connecting experts with front line sales, so the organisation’s rapidly evolving product portfolio reaches the market quickly.