Saint Gobain PAM – Regional Sales Manager
CASE STUDY
SAINT GOBAIN PAM - REGIONAL SALES MANAGER
Saint-Gobain PAM is the premier supplier of ductile iron and cast iron products to the UK’s key utilities, telecoms, highways, civil engineering, construction and housing companies. The business has been on a “customer excellence” journey for a number of years in an attempt to embed customer needs at the heart of everything the business does.
KEY CHALLENGES
The ongoing a transformation process within the business has meant a geographic reorganisation of the salesforce to better reflect their customer base, leaving an RSM position vacant. Good Talent were invited to assist and were confronted with the following:
- Advertising had failed.
- 2 other Recruitment Agencies had already been engaged yet had been unable to present a shortlist of viable quality.
- The “customer excellence” journey had impacted the businesses value proposition to the market. From a sales perspective it had necessitated the need for a more sophisticated sales approach, the ability to build long term value based relationships rather than manage a transactional interaction based on cost. These skills are rare for this type of role!
- We also needed to find a professional aligned to the wider sustainability agenda, a major corporate push for the business as mandated by Group direction.
SOLUTION & RESULTS
It was obvious that the traditional agency approach of “database and advertising” was not fit for purpose in this instance. We recommended a proactive search methodology, however we knew that this too would be unsuccessful if we did not get our target parameters right. Leveraging our experience we worked closely with Line Management & HR to uncover the performance metrics for this role. Rather than working from a Person Specification comprised of “nice to haves” we worked together to develop a clear mission statement and blueprint of what needed to be delivered. From here we created a performance based scorecard against which we could assess. This consulting work allowed us to significantly widen the scope of what we could look at yet at the same time giving us a crystal clear picture of what we were looking for.
Following our search process we were able to present 4 candidates, all of which were stronger than any of the candidates seen previously, from which one was selected successfully.
Our deep experience within recruitment in combination with our consultative abilities allowed us to identify and execute the most appropriate solution for this particular situation. Experience counts, always.