Bespak producers of high precision components for cosmetics packaging engaged Anderson Baillie Business Growth to help their cosmetics account managers increase their sales figures by 30%.

Anderson Baillie conducted a number of investigation meetings to understand how the business worked, how profits were generated and to assess the skill levels of the account managers. It was identified that the core issue was planning and targeting - the account managers had enthusiasm, but no sales plan.

Four workshops were arranged with the account managers, managed onsite to enable business continuity. The first, dealt with proposition – what is Bespak’s value and why. This value had address product, quality and counter the growth of rival products. The second workshop introduced formalised key account plans. The third then progressed into market development and the final workshop onto the production and formulation of the sales and market plan.

Creating value beyond engineering quality was the first challenge for Anderson Baillie, because Bespak is an engineering based company, their proposition had to represent their core values of quality, consistency and capability. None of this understanding of their own values was present in the company, sales pitches would talk about their history but the story was not packaged or delivered according to the 3C method. Case studies featuring famous brands had not been packaged to sell the 3C value and so their references offered little support in a selling argument. However, by implementing the 3C model, Anderson Baillie helped Bespak gain considerable brand collateral from their engagement.

Once established, the value proposition for Bespak had to be considered across all aspects of business, including the manufacturing teams who held considerable power and influence in the company. They were engaged in a second stage workshop to validate and contribute to the proposition. The teams recognised the proposition, valued it and believed that it reflected their culture from the shop floor to the boardroom.

With the proposition accepted, Anderson Baillie moved on to helping the account teams understand the consumption behaviour of their customers. This was vital as all had huge historical knowledge of their customers, but most didn’t understand how to apply it. A full account-by-account analysis took place within a workshop to determine behaviour, contacts, competition and contracts. This was then applied to procurement profiles and an analysis of what was consumed that Bespak didn’t provide. For this last point it was uncovered that it was a combination of a bad past experience and not knowing that these products were available. This led to the development of a selling journey and story to support it, helping the account teams through their own gap analysis introduce products and services, such as research consultancy and product testing within the 3C framework. Each account manager was given tasks and planning tools to create their own key account plans. They were tasked with the research and documentation of the decision making process for each of the accounts, the documentation of contacts and influencers – none of which existed before as no sales force automation tools or customer relationship management software existed in Bespak.

The final stages of the programme supported by Anderson Baillie was to simply draw all of these findings together to formulate a sales plan, implement measurement tools and new business development strategies that were then presented to the Bespak team for final implementation.