Summer of 2007 I was faced with a decision that changed my life. I was working as a project manager in a construction company mainly managing kitchen and bath projects; I had been doing that for the past three years when I was given an opportunity by A2Z home remodel to manage a showroom with a team of salespeople. My job would consist of training a sales team on product knowledge and how to complete a sale. It was a tough decision to make, the company did not have a system in place, I did not have any schooling background, or managerial background, just the skills I had learned from work through experience, and my pay would be commission only. I accepted the job and looked forward to the start date.
The first thing that I did is organized a meeting and talked to each individual on how much knowledge each salesperson had and what process were taken to complete a job. I needed to discover what I was working with, what strongpoints the salespeople had and what I needed to work on. The second thing was to create a system for the sales field and the construction field, “Such discrepancies—say, in organizational or unit performance—may be detected by comparing current performance against (1) past performance, (2) the current performance of other organizations or units, or (3) future expected performance as determined by plans and forecasts”. I needed to know what they were implementing to their business that was not working and create a system similar to the company that I was working for with my own adjustments.
I was ready to make my adjustments and I started with the sales department, sales is the backbone of any business, especially this one, the whole process starts when someone sells a job, I created a system starting from leads to presentations to closing sales. Each salesperson was given a lead that I monitored, salespeople had to make an appointment based on the clients convenience, I created a presentation kit, based on the job they were going to present. Unlike other companies there was no price passing at the home, the salespeople would come back and prepare a design for their project and a separate presentation prepared for them inside the showroom, and this was the closing of the sale.
When I arrived to this company the construction team was a mess, they were trying to save on labor and appointing one person to do multiple traits, I do not want to go to a heart sergeant and have him operate on my eye. I reorganized the