Sales Training Success: CustomerCentric Selling® helps MDI optimize resources to increase sales by 40% while cutting the sales cycle in half.

Business Problem
Marketing Direct, Inc. (MDI) did not have established best practices for how to sell their service offerings. Because of this challenge, sales managers were traveling extensively to close poorly qualified opportunities which not only incurred growing travel and expense (T&E) dollars, but also cost the company valuable manpower resources and time. Additionally, MDI lacked a common language for discussing and managing opportunities in the pipeline, which further hurt their overall sales productivity.

The CustomerCentric Selling® Solution
Because of its well-respected reputation and being known for delivering results, CustomerCentric Selling® (CCS™) was the provider of choice for MDI's Senior VP, Michael Burns, and President, Dennis Barnes Jr. MDI conducted their first CCS™ workshop at their offices in St. Louis, Missouri.

Once they completed the CustomerCentric Selling® workshop, MDI began to immediately see results in their execution. With the guidance of CustomerCentric Selling's methodology, they were able to identify a way to codify and implement best selling practices throughout the company, which provided the first step towards better organizing their resources. From there, they were able to confidently filter and ensure that their sales pipeline contained only qualified opportunities, which allowed them to restrict business travel only to those properly qualified opportunities later in the sales cycle. This efficiency in itself saved MDI thousands of T&E dollars that added valuable money back into their bottom line.

 

As part of ensuring the ongoing success of their implementation, MDI also found a way to clearly communicate milestones throughout the sales process which allows them to measure both improvements and deficiencies.

As a result of implementing the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology, MDI's sales increased by 40% and selling expense decreased by 40%. Moreover, the length of the sales cycle was cut in half.

"By implementing and following the CCS™ discipline, MDI has created a highly productive sales organization unlike any other in the Direct Marketing industry. Our sales cycle has been cut in half, our sales growth averages over 20% per year, all while having the ability to effectively grow the sales organization."

--Michael Burns, Senior VP for Marketing Direct, Inc. (MDI)

Benefits to MDI:

• Codify and implement best selling practices throughout the organization
• Identify only qualified opportunities in the pipeline
• Clearly communicate milestones
• Reduced T&E by 40%
• Increased sales by 40% and 20% year over year
• Cut length of sales cycle in half

More information on MDI can be found at www.marketingdirect.com

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