Mitchell Press / Deanick Case Study
$24M revenue
The Challenge
The challenge with Mitchell is that they are 100 year old print company that has been very successful in Vancouver and Western Canada who have not only an ageing workforce of people that have worked there for 20, 30, 40 years, but also an aging client base, who are now retiring or being moved onto pastures new. Not only do Mitchell Press have to navigate declining print sales globally, but they also have to manage their maturing employees, and the fact that their clients are now retiring, and the new crop of people coming through are millennials and Gen Z. Thus, they don't know how to sell or work with them. Because of that they've been losing revenue year over year. COVID has accelerated their revenue loss. It has accelerated their need to change their process internally, and they now need to add new services and products to their portfolio, diversify their portfolio, and they need to hire and train younger employees who are able to add to their existing experienced team.
The team had always done sales face to face, in person, like an outdated style of sales, and there was no clear process, everyone had their own process. The way they had been doing sales up until March 2020 was now encumbered by COVID because they could no longer do the face to face, golf course, lunch, drinks, relationship building sales that they were doing previously. The new crop of people that they're having to sell to, aren’t interested in meeting for lunch or playing golf to build a relationship. They're much more service orientated than relationship orientated and so you have a sales team who have been selling one way for a long time that's worked for them fine, but you now have this just wild colliding of COVID and retiring.
The Solution
We created a brand new sales playbook for their team that incorporated outbound prospecting, to find and sell to net new prospects and companies that had never worked with Mitchell Press before, a playbook that focused on this new sales team. Knowing how to cold call, knowing how to run discovery calls, knowing how to build a relationship over the phone and over video conference as opposed to on the golf course. Setting up really simple prospecting targets so here's how many emails you should be sending a week, here is how many phone calls you should be doing a week. We built them a “day in the life of a top sales professional”. Here's how you should be setting up your calendar, here's how you should be setting up your day to be the most successful, helping them understand the sales stages so we go from prospecting, to discovery to proposal to contract to closing and why we're in each stage, how long we stay in each stage for, why we're in that stage, the challenges of that stage.
We built guidelines for them on how to close a deal while maintaining profitability. Not taking bad deals just because they are agreeing to pay you money. Or when someone asks for a discount, how to say no and why to say no. That stuff.
To do that, we interviewed the entirety of the senior management team from the C-level all the way down to mid-level managers. We interviewed the entirety of their sales team and really understood what they believe the company is, where they think the challenges are, where they think they should be going in the future. Using that information to not only give a written report to a C level group of, here's what the company is today, but then using that as our basis for our training modules. We understood that the team thought Mitchell Press was this traditional print company. However, the general management team wanted to be a future New Age print company and so those two things did not melt together.
We then did a two day training course, with the playbook as the main topic and we ran through the playbook. We did role playing, we set them tasks and coaching opportunities. It was all managed remotely and recorded so now it’s a living training manual they use to onboard and train any new people coming on.
The Results
Their profitability is much better
Their outbound has improved exponentially
Their hiring process it's so much quicker. Recent new hires were on the phone within two to three weeks with no experience.
The onboarding can be quicker now because there's training videos that they can watch in their first few days, learn the formula and start to implement it right away.
Case Study Details
Client: Mitchell Press
Industry: Digital and Print Marketing
Location: Vancouver, BC
Since 1928, Mitchell has grown into North America’s foremost print marketing company with a rich history in print craft, combined with industry-leading technology and sustainability practices. At Mitchell, we develop products and services that combine the best of craft, data, and technology to help shape brands and launch unique stories into the world.