Employment Background Investigations (EBI) - Sales Support Team of the Year

Company: Employment Background Investigations (EBI ) Inc., Owings Mills, MD
Company Description: EBI is one of the largest privately held screening firms in the USA, providing background screening, drug testing, occupational healthcare and Form I-9/E-Verify services. A founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, EBI holds ISO certifications for both Quality Management and Information Security, and is routinely named a top screening provider.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Support Team of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: EBI: Blending Teams to Give Clients the Best Onboarding Experience

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

EBI provides a complete suite of background screening, drug testing and occupational health services to help our clients hire the right people as quickly and as easily as possible. Some of our clients do more than 10,000 hires a year, while others do less than 5. That means our solution must be flexible enough to support everything from large, technology-based organizations to small mom-and-pop shops.

Since every client has different needs, it is critical that our Sales Support Team hasthe expertise and the flexibility to manage each unique challenge. Once our sales team creates a solution for a client, our Sales Support Team – comprised of our implementation and account management groups -- develops a plan to build, launch and support the program. Each piece is complex, from account set-up, product packages, pricing and support communication protocol. It takes a lot of time and effort, but each and every program is built to meet the client’s exact needs.

2018 Improvements

In 2018 we made two major changes to our processes to ensure the Sales Support Team can deliver superior service to our clients in the most efficient way possible. First, we enhanced our Salesforce Automation (SFA) tool to make it easier for the implementation group to see and understand what the sales team has proposed to a new client. Second, we adjusted the way the implementation group works with the account management group, allowing them to work more effectively together and to create a smoother experience across the board.

The enhancements to our SFA tool included creating and integrating a Custom Package Build Page. Before this improvement, the salesperson would create a summary of solutions and pass it directly to the implementation group. Often, the sales team would fail to gather all the information needed. This led to delays while the implementation groupworked to fill in the blanks. Now, the tool generates questions for the sales team, so everything is in place and in “implementation language” when it moves on to the next step. By smoothing out the implementation process, our clients now get up and running faster.

Building on this technological improvement, we also adjusted the way the two groups within our Sales Support Team work together. Now, upon completion, the Custom Package Build Page is reviewed by implementation staff with functional experience in account management, as well as by account management staff with functional experience in implementation. This team identifies appropriate operational functional groups, green lights development requirements to begin, organizes a project team, and selects a team member with cross functional experience in account management and implementation to lead the project team through launch. This new process makes it possible to allocate the appropriate resources at the very beginning and has resulted in much faster and smoother onboarding.

Our goal in implementing these changes within the Sales Support Team’s processes was three-fold: to improve the client onboarding experience, to make the client onboarding project more seamless and to assure successful launch key performance metrics were achieved. We are thrilled to report that, by December 2018, we have achieved these goals, as evidenced by the Support Team’s key metrics.

Sales Support Team Key Metrics*

• New Account Implementation: Year over year from contract to launch improved 35.4%
• Package Changes for Existing Clients: Year over year from request to fulfillment improved 60.4%
• Client Location Adds: Year over year from request to launched location improved 38.8%
• General Support Questions: Year over year response times improved 39.5%

These key metric improvements were achieved in a year of 38% revenue growth -- demonstrating the effectiveness of the Sales Support Team in improving the client experience and handling scale.

*Refer to attachment for source data