Pure HR provides specialist and flexible outsourced HR services to small and medium-sized businesses from its base in Hampshire.
The team of eight are all qualified HR professionals with decades of experience and commercial acumen whose mission is to help businesses realise its potential through its people.
From project work to retained HR services that act as an extension of the core business, Pure HR provides bespoke services that could include staff admin and benefit solutions, employee engagement and retention schemes, learning and development programmes and organisational change.
Its training service also supports internal HR teams with easy-to-access courses on policies and procedures and the fixed-free recruitment offering is a valuable resource for internal HR departments.
What they Needed
The team at Pure HR were all excellent at fulfilling the human resources needs on behalf of their clients, so much so, that a lot of their business was obtained through referrals.
However, with very little sales experience and no one dedicated to business development, the consultants knew they were missing opportunities to convert leads.
They needed support in developing thier sales conversations, understanding how to fully qualify the customer and gain the confidence to handle objections.
Unless clients were a ‘sure thing’, enquiries were left to go cold, eventually falling off the pipeline and leaving the business with no ‘low-hanging fruit’.
Although Pure HR was not short of clients, and extremely happy ones, they knew the time had come to use their commerciality to grow their own business.
What We Did
With the Managing Director currently taking on the responsibility for business development, we thought it made sense for her to join our Sales Den programme.
Our online mentoring, training and networking community was a great place for business owners to share their sales techniques, successes and lessons learned. This provided Stephanie with a strong foundation from which to develop basis selling skills and implement a sales process.
From here, we arranged to carry out a sales training workshop for the entire team. This covered everything from basic sales techniques, how to ask the right questions to building a rapport with the customer and closing the ‘deal’. Role play was used with a number of outcomes, including negative ones, to remove any fear the consultants had around rejection. It was also designed to play to the team’s existing strengths and soft approach.
In particular, we focussed on helping the team to identify cross-selling opportunities – many of which they were already providing advice on, but not using sales skills to direct the client towards the add-on service.
We then looked at formalising a sales process and creating a visible sales funnel that the team could track, monitor and act on.
The Result
Initial feedback from the team told us that they felt knowledgeable enough to have confident conversations with both existing clients and prospective ones. Knowing that the worst thing that could happen was a client saying ‘no’ and having a process to deal with that put everyone at ease.
Business development activity could now be delegated across the team, meaning more enquiries could be dealt with and followed up with the support of a robust sales process.
The sales training workshop resulted in an increase in new clients, but most notably, an uplift in upselling to existing clients.
What They Say
Stephanie Barnett
Managing Director at Pure HR
“The sales training workshop provided by Zest was fantastic and absolutely made a difference – not only to the overall confidence of the team and having the right skills to have the right conversations, but also to the bottom line.
We have definitely seen an increase in successful cross-sales being made. For example, moving clients from a pay as you go project service to a retained client because we can now easily explain the benefits to them in a way that makes them purchase.
The development of a sales process also means that we have a structured sales funnel with diarised tasks to make sure we follow up on as many opportunities as possible.”
