Case Study: Sales Team Redesign for Scalable Results

THE STORY

This is a story about a small but mighty craft brewery. This brewery owner (and founder) had a vision to brew great beer, and to connect people and community through that beer. An ambitious owner, unafraid of challenging the status quo, he wanted to distribute his own beer to restaurant owners and liquor stores.

Craft breweries do not typically self-distribute. Rather, they opt for a consolidated, large-scale distributor and their corresponding business practices. Remaining self-distributing would allow this brewery to maintain control of the product, pricing, customer experience, and brand awareness as the sales team built new accounts across the upper Midwest.

Our story began when this owner reached out to Codavision after many months of stalled growth, high frustration, missed opportunities, and unscalable sales processes. Simply put, he was not equipped to build a viable sales team and get his product to market.

THE CHALLENGES

Product inventory and offerings: The desire to honor the nimble and ever-changing product offerings in craft brewing, while optimizing production to facilitate efficient distribution.

Sales Talent & Positioning: The current small team of 4 did not possess the skills or capacity to take on the self-distribution model.

Sales Team Leadership: The wrong person in the wrong seat created a lack of sales management and leadership; thwarting growth, accountability, and results.

Incentive & Sales Performance Compensation Gap: The commission and bonus structures to incentivize a new sales strategy needed to be revamped and clarified.

THE SOLUTION

Reaching out to Codavision, and the principal sales coach, Lori Coda-Peterson, was the first step in solving the many nuanced and layered challenges this owner was facing.

Lori Coda-Peterson knew firsthand how to build a sales team through talent selection, talent development, and training. And, she knew how to assist the brewery owner in creating a sales incentive program and revenue targets that aligned with key business outcomes.

Lori recommended that the optimal engagement be a 6-month partnership, focusing on updating and redesigning the sales process and team, maximized with a powerful tool called CliftonStrengths (formerly Strengthsfinder).

By supplementing the sales process redesign with CliftonStrengths, each stakeholder, from owner to operations, had more insight and knowledge into each team member's most natural way of thinking, feeling and behaving.

The Partnership looked like this:

1. We developed a strategic sales strategy and sales incentive/compensation program that aligned with distribution revenue goals.

2. We developed an understanding of each stakeholders strengths in order to ensure that each member was working in a role that was naturally a fit for them to improve engagement, creativity and productivity.

3. We supported the sales team, new hire and new sales manager as they moved forward in building the territory and hitting revenue targets by holding weekly coaching and training through the transition.

THE RESULT

With Codavision’s coaching, this brewery developed a completely scalable and efficient sales process. The sales team now has a strong sales manager, a successful new hire in a new market, and a valuable team member who happily moved to operations/inside sales. The results speak for themselves as engagement is soaring, they are having fun, and have DOUBLED REVENUE from $400k in 2021 to $850k in 2022. (Target revenue of $1 million+ in 2023.) Codavision's experience in sales teams, leadership and processes took all of this off of the owner's plate. Energized and focused, he then was able to execute toward his mission: connecting more people and more community through incredible beer.

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