Charlie Howes, Director at Nude Life had a sales team but their performance had plateaued… He knew that the key to success was building a sales environment that motivated and allowed the team to thrive. In this post, we take a look at Charlie’s journey to building a successful sales environment.
We hit the threshold of efficiency. The next thing for growth was going to be more of a sales environment and that's where Geckoboard came in.
What does Charlie mean by sales environment? Let’s break it down.
What is a sales environment?
A sales environment is the culture surrounding a sales team. A good sales environment encourages healthy competition and motivates team members through clear direction and goals.
Charlie wanted to create a sales environment that would give his team purpose and align everyone around their goals. Read on to find out how he went about this.
Charlie’s journey to success
In 2016 Charlie founded Nude Life, a life drawing party business. It was a side project whilst he continued to work full time in other roles.
Within a year, the side project was growing in a way that Charlie had never expected. He was receiving thousands of enquiries. For each enquiry he received, he needed to send back a quote, and this was just too much for his Gmail account to handle. As a result he decided to invest in Intercom to manage automated life drawing party quotes for the business.
There's a point where you need a service like Intercom and it's when communications internally are just inefficient.
Implementing Intercom allowed Nude Life to send quotes out fast, and at scale as well as avoiding increased spend on headcount to cover the enquiries.
With new potential for scale, Charlie wanted to pull on growth levers for Nude Life. He invested in paid ads, SEO optimization and efficiencies within Intercom.
He also hired a sales team.
However, once the sales people were in, Charlie realized he needed to create a sales environment in order for the new team to thrive.
He understood that a key part of this sales environment was the oversight of performance.
Building a sales environment
Initially he implemented a spreadsheet which pulled sales data for the month together using various formulae. But this wasn't particularly engaging and as Charlie was still working in other full time roles, he needed to automate as much of his process as possible.
Charlie needed something that would deliver sales targets and individual performance on a regular basis. Something to motivate and encourage friendly competition among the sales team. But also something that he wouldn’t have to manually update and share daily.
This is when he found Geckoboard.
The vision for using Geckoboard was about getting daily snapshots into Slack to get the sales team looking at that data and feeling aligned.
To further build that sales environment, Charlie set clear goals and offered bonuses. These were fed into the dashboard so that sales team members could always see where they were headed.
What Geckoboard does is it enables transparency of performance. It gives people a guideline and something to aim for. We also obviously brought in targets and remuneration for those targets but the dashboard just gives people a bit more purpose and direction.
I think in any role when you lack that purpose and direction or you don't know what you're aiming for, people can just get a little bit bored. It gives clear focus and aligns everyone.
With Geckoboard Charlie was able to pull key sales data from Intercom, Google Analytics and Google Sheets into one place so that everyone had an overview of how the business was performing.
This overview became particularly useful more recently when Charlie quit his full time job and founded Klatch, a digital marketing agency for healthcare companies. Though Nude Life is managed predominantly by his sisters, Charlie remains actively involved as Director. As an extremely busy entrepreneur with multiple businesses up his sleeve, Charlie wasn’t always able to stay on top of the day to day running of Nude Life.
Prior to using Geckoboard, an issue might occur on the Nude Life site and he wouldn’t spot it as fast as he’d like. Now, thanks to his scheduled dashboard snapshots in Slack he’s always able to spot any problems and act fast to rectify them.
That 8am snapshot in Slack is also a really good way for me to see if everything's working and it kind of gives me peace of mind because I'm focused on other things. I check it every morning to make sure everything is OK.
For an extremely busy Founder and Director, Geckoboard has helped Charlie to align his team and stay informed on the day to day health of his business.
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