Hardie Fasteners was founded in 1997 by Joseph Hardie and supplies the marine, manufacturing, engineering and construction industry with quality fasteners.
Challenges
The company was doing well, but growth had plateaued for several years. Joseph in his own words claimed that he was going through the motions and probably wasn’t as focused on growing the company as he could have been.
In early 2015 Joseph realised he had a good, but not great business, and set his sights on a lofty 2020 target. To achieve this, he realised he needed to improve his sales, and as the default sales manager of the business with three reps, he believed it needed to start with him.
The company in early 2015 had very little in the way of sales management systems or processes in place, and wasn’t sure what it should be doing to improve sales. The sales team had no sales process in place and focused on competing by price. There was no CRM being used, meaning it was hard to understand what activities the reps were undertaking.
How we helped
In June 2015 Joseph began a journey with Sales Syndicate - the peer to peer learning and development programme for sales leaders. The programme put him alongside like-minded individuals trying to improve their capability, and as a result reach a higher revenue target for their companies. The journey has been invaluable and the changes have been remarkable.
The results
In the last 2 years the company has grown annual revenue by approximately 90%, which has had a much larger impact on the bottom line. The owner now has a new lease of life. While it took some time for the other sales members to get on board, pretty soon they saw the impacts of the changes they had made and as a result all became hungry to learn.
The sales team has now implemented a new sales process and consistently work to improve this. They focus on the learnings from both their wins and their losses, and are motivated by a new incentive plan that has been put in place. In the last 18 months the company has re branded, built a new website, hired more account managers and implemented a new CRM system which is providing excellent data so as to better manage their opportunities and the team.
The company is now on track to reach its 2020 target, and the motivation and passion for the business has returned both to the owner and staff.
