Sales Partnerships, Inc., Broomfield, CO, United States: The Science of Sales

Our nomination is a written submission including attachments.
The Sales Partnerships(SPI) nomination for Sales Process of the Year, “The Science of Sales” focuses on how we leverage value based selling approaches to increase sales results.
Sales Partnerships is a domestic field sales outsourcing specialist - creating and growing jobs within the United States rather than off-shoring. Unlike the call center model, SPI focuses on handling deals cradle to grave with an emphasis on direct revenue creation (as opposed to lead generation which is best classified as business development outsourcing.) Our teams are recruited for and dedicated to individual clients based on client program requirements. Because Sales Outsourcing means dedicated cradle-to-grave (origination through close) sales under the brand of an individual client, SPI’s work is also differentiated from value added resellers in that each of our teams focus just on that clients’ products and services closing deals on the clients’ paper with the client owning the customer relationship long term.
It is important to understand that we treat The Science of Sales as more than just something taught in training classes and in the field with managers. SPI’s mission as an outsourced sales provider is to optimize every controllable element associated with selling.
We use a metric based interviewing process assessing skills and personality traits that impact sales performance. Part of that interview process is benchmarking the selling skills of each candidate. We grade this based on the Science of Sales framework giving us a starting point to understand the training and skills development best needed for improving that individual. We also assess how each candidate learns to better allow us to deliver needed skills in ways customized to each learner.

Our proprietary field management solutions take field activity and translate it into likely skill-based causal areas for improvement. That gives our managers an advantage in better impacting performance by engineering their field time to highlight areas of opportunity.

Importantly, this constant work to improve sales skill doesn’t just focus on those below target. This process identifies opportunities in even the most talented sales representatives. We firmly believe that being a top performer shouldn’t mean your ongoing development should be any less important.

Finally, our focus to be a diverse workplace and be actively involved in our communities ties directly to the sales process as well. We focus on real-world communication mirroring how we communicate outside of work. We combine this with emotive selling techniques to enhance the rapport connection with the customer. By going to field with staff that mirror their territories and armed with stories about work helping those communities, it increases the probability of engaging with a customer to better understand their goals and pains and solve for them. In essence, we give better answers to the people we trust.

With this preface, we appreciate being considered for this award and appreciate your time in judging us. Thank you.

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2022 marked Sales Partnerships' 25th year. We are a 9-time prior Stevie winner in the Sales Outsourcing Provider category and 2-time Sales Process of the Year winner.

We represent the brands of some of the largest and most respected companies in the world ranging from Google to Dow Chemical to work in finance and healthcare. Our core focus is field based b2b and b2c direct sales.

Our hallmark is using and inventing systems and processes that optimize all the important areas impacting sales: recruiting, diversity, technology, training, management, analytics, and strategy. These drive the dedicated teams we build and manage for each client. 

We have become recognized as a leader and innovator in our space with coverage in Selling Power, Sales and Marketing Management Magazine, Inc. Magazine, and CNNMoney. Over 25 years, we have generated more than $10B in gross profits for our clients while setting industry gold standards for brand protection (less than 0.0004% customer complaint rates compared to between 1% and 3% industry standard rates for external channels.) We have operated in every significant MSA in the United States as well as in select markets globally - adjusting field footprint based on client needs.

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SPI utilizes a sales process called “The Science of Sales”. The sales methodology utilizes a real-world approach to sales where the customers are viewed as people rather than “targets.” Old practices such as using open-ended questions to start a conversion were replaced with practices better fitting today’s culture. SPI’s emotive selling teaching, for example, goes into why customers make decisions that aren’t necessarily logical from a business perspective. Ultimately, we are selling to people – rationally and emotionally – both are used in equal measure when deciding to buy. This last piece integrates with our focus on diversity. By having teams that reflect their local communities, we can better leverage those emotive connections.

All elements of the selling system are backed by metric tracking, where we can take actual production data and immediately identify the causal elements for challenges and flag opportunities for improvement. 

The two case studies demonstrating the results of this process are in telecommunications and merchant processing. Telecommunications, we went head to head with Fortune 500 industry leaders. In that program we took South Denver and Greater Raleigh markets and grew them from 5% market capture to 55% for a much smaller mid-tier ISP.

Our merchant processing sales work was nationwide in scope. Representing a Fortune 500 provider, we had to shift to focus on customers who had previously rejected our client through other channels as our primary target market and meet 12 month goals in 9 months. We came in at 105% of target.

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SPI’s leadership through The Science of Sales has led to recognitions by our peers including our publishing sales advice in Selling Power and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine as well as speaking at global summits including Pharmaforce. 

What are the results? Head-to-head, SPI has never been outperformed by a competitor or client organization in our 25 years. Our average performance is 50% higher than our nearest peer. Our turnover rates for performance are half the industry average because we are able to self-identify problems before quotas are missed. And, in a year when field sales personnel were harder to recruit than any time since the 1940's, we were able not only to meet our yearly quotas (and pre-pandemic quotas at that), we were able to exceed them.

The Science of Sales process accounts for nearly a quarter of our increased results. This was determined by looking at impacts of the sales process in recruiting assessments tied to those skills (comparing candidate strengths) and improvements in those skills reached through training and management. This gives us benchmarking for relative impact of the skills taught. The remaining elements are in gold-standard recruiting teams and processes, technology, field managers, and senior level analysis.

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The following attachments and links are included to support our nomination:

● Two case study tied to the field work using teams trained in this methodology (merchant processing and telecommunications)

● “SPI Gives” summary document - our community work reinforces concepts taught in the Science of Sales about emotive connections to the community - we even teach how to leverage the community work as part of the sales process to better connect with customers.

● Documentation on SPI’s Diversity and Inclusion Work

● Documentation on SPI’s Metric Based Interviewing process that incorporates measurements of skill sets within the Science of Sales framework

● Link to the SPI homepage for more information about our organization

Thank you again for your time and consideration for Sales Partnerships for the Top Sales Process in America.