Oakwood Temporary Housing

Company: Oakwood Temporary Housing, Los Angeles, CA
Company Description: Oakwood is the leading provider of furnished and serviced apartments worldwide, with presence in over 3,000 locations throughout North America, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific. Over the last 50 years, we have focused on exceeding our customers? expectations and helping them meet their mobility and talent management objectives. We provide a ?Gold Standard? service that earns our clients? trust.
Nomination Category: Sales Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Process of the Year

Nomination Title: Oakwood Temporary Housing

Tell the story about your organization's sales process implementation since the beginning of July last year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Being successful in sales takes more than stamina and ingenuity. Having a
process helps ensure reliability and success. Oakwood’s sales team had been
functioning on the fly – doing what “seemed right,” with no metrics, no
benchmarks and no methodology. Based on our experiences and research, we knew
that identifying and institutionalizing Oakwood’s best practices would be a key
driver of our success.

Ken Revenaugh instituted a process by way of the “Sales Playbook” that
completely transformed how the sales and marketing team does business with the
goal of achieving a best-in-class sales and marketing go-to-market framework.
The main focus of our process was to teach our team how to “win fast and lose
fast.” As a result, we spend less time on losing prospects and focus on winnable
deals that positively impact our bottom line.

Challenges

We had no overarching best practices or processes for the sales force to
follow. Revenaugh needed to create systems to compel consistent results and
reduce time between qualifying and closing sales.

To outline what “success” looked like for Oakwood, to identify top performers’
practices and propagate them among the masses.

To develop a definition for managing opportunity that would provide clear,
measurable objectives to determine if the sale was progressing.

Major Initiatives

Revenaugh spearheaded an intensive interview process and led a
cross-functional team to identify top performers’ best practices.

By combining those ideas with outside best practices, he decoded the tools and
resources needed to gather, get and grow business and to focus on the Single
Sales Objective (SSO).

SSO moved us from an account management mindset to an opportunity management
mindset and provided clear, measurable objectives to determine if sales were
progressing.

Revenaugh defined a common language to articulate key strategic components.

Our resulting Sales Playbook created a blueprint for strategic selling at
Oakwood. It documents sales process and outlines how to close sales.

Oakwood’s top performers served as champions for the Playbook and persuaded
their colleagues of its value. While sales associates are not typically fond of
“process,” branding and rolling out our plans as a “Sales Playbook” was
extremely successful.

Results

Sales associates learned how to win more in less time. In Jan-09, the average
amount of time to close an SSO was 5.5 months. By August, we reduced it to 1.9
months. The rate at which we convert prospects to customers has gone from 2% to
8% during the same period.

With only 304 wins for the full year 2008 and already 946 wins for 2009
(through Aug-09), everyone is on the same page regarding what is / is not an SSO.

Win revenue of ~$129 million for 2009 (through Aug-09) has surpassed the total
win revenue of $53 million for 2008. Associates are prioritizing the right
selling activities against the right customers at the right time.

As of Aug-09, Oakwood has already converted over 9% of 4,500 newly targeted
prospects to customers, representing $7.3M.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Oakwood RoadMap
http://promotions.oakwood.com/Roadmap/index.html

Miller Heiman Study
http://promotions.oakwood.com/Roadmap/_assets/CaseStudyOakwood.pdf
;
Miller Heiman Client Summit
http://www.millerheiman.com/workshops_events/client_summit_us/san-francisco.html

LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenrevenaugh
;;;;;;;;;;;
Sales Enablement Executive Summit
http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Summary.aspx?e=e171c66f-27e0-456b-b95e-e22b9b7dec82

SAVO/Nielsen Business webcast of Oakwood’s story
http://www.nielsencast.com/ws/content_display/event/e3iea9ebb170ad87d30e46d22db90ee67b0

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated sales organization:

Ken Revenaugh is Vice President, Sales Operations of Oakwood Temporary Housing.
He was hired to build out the sales operations function and lead the
implementation of a sales and marketing transformation that guarantees Oakwood’s
continued position as the industry leader in temporary housing.
He is; known for designing, developing and implementing analytics, tools and
processes that drive maximum sales performance. Prior to joining Oakwood,
Revenaugh instituted plans that reversed four years of steadily declining
revenues at Exhibitgroup/Giltspur. During his tenure at FedEx (then Kinko’s), he
helped drive record levels of revenues, profits and market share.