As a consequence the company, a self-standing subsidiary of PG Group, is poised to grow market share significantly when the market recovery begins.
"Through using Tracer CQM, we have managed to reorient our sales people's activities, ensuring that they focus their time and effort on the right customers," says Delme Thomas, MD of Primador. "We categorise our clients by current and potential value into A, B and C. Since March 2009, when we started using the product, our A customers have grown 28% on orders invoiced with us in a market that is 30% down; and 26% of our B customers have grown their revenues; on the other hand, our ratio of C customers has dropped from 52% to 17%.
"Strategically, we had to focus on the right customers, as A and B customers place larger orders and are less of a credit risk. Reducing our volume of C customers means better uninterrupted production runs and fewer milk runs for our vehicles, we can reduce admin and we have taken on no bad debt, which in these times is critical."
The initial application of the methodology had shown a common flaw in Primador's sales team of 13: they were calling frequently on smaller, less profitable customers and ignoring the larger, more valuable ones.
"This is a regular occurrence in sales teams," says Tracer CQM MD Cobus van Graan. "Sales people visit customers with whom they are comfortable, rather than the ones that represent the highest current and future value.
This has a negative impact on sales and margin, and the worst part of it is that often management does not even know that sales people are calling on the wrong companies, and the wrong people in the right companies, until it's too late to do anything about it."
The company's handheld solution prevents this by giving management real-time insight into the day-to-day activities of their sales team, including quality of leads and frequency and quality of customer interaction. By categorising clients by their actual and potential value, and building a strong and credible pipeline, the product allows companies to treat their customers differently, and either discard lower value clients or interact with them through a lower cost channel, such as a contact centre.
In addition, it has boosted the effectiveness of the Primador sales team by putting its consultant Debby Cock in charge as an outsourced sales manager.
"Debby has made a profound impact on our sales team," adds Thomas. "As we expected, our sales force was a little resistant to the introduction of the new methodology and technology, but Debby helped us tremendously in gaining acceptance, coaching and upskilling our people and now actually managing them. For the first time, we can do forward planning, see our sales pipeline, what it was going to be and what it actually yielded, and implement remedial action while it still matters."
