Company: Sales Partnerships, Inc., Broomfield, CO
Company Description: Sales Partnerships, Inc. is the premier direct sales outsourcing company in the world, offering branded representation that delivers rapid revenue lift for the most influential B2B firms in the world. Whether it's brand activation, customer acquisition, or retention, SPI is the leader in providing scalable and proven solutions to the Fortune 500.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Operations Professional of the Year
 Nomination Title: SPI Sales Operations Guru - Rowan
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the achievements since July 1, 2020 of the nominated individual, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
Our nomination is a written submission including attachments.
Rowan Rozanski is SPI's nominee for Sales Operations Professional of the Year. Giving the nomination context requires a high level understanding of what Sales Partnerships does as a company.
Sales Partnerships is a domestic field sales outsourcing specialist. SPI focuses on handling deals cradle to grave with an emphasis on direct revenue creation. Our teams are recruited for and dedicated to individual clients based on client program requirements. Because Sales Outsourcing means dedicated cradle-to-grave (origination through close) sales under the brand of an individual client, SPI’s work is also differentiated from value added resellers in that each of our teams focus just on that clients’ products and services closing deals on the clients’ paper with the client owning the customer relationship long term.
Our hallmark is using and inventing systems and processes that optimize all the important areas impacting sales: recruiting, diversity, technology, training, management, analytics, and strategy. These drive the dedicated teams we build and manage for each client
This requires that we go to market with SPI designed and supported systems rather than just using the client's tools. This is in addition to our providing bridge tools that allow our systems and our clients' systems to communicate seamlessly. Our work includes representing some of the largest and most respected brands in the world ranging from companies like Google and Dow Chemical to healthcare companies like Praxair.
As you can imagine, the IS support requirements are more complex than in a typical field sales environment. Rowan has led our IS support team to not only exceed client expectations in technology support but also helped speed our time to market through faster rep training and onboarding. Her philosophy of close engagement with the field sales managers and making sure everyone in IS support gets routine time in the field with sales representatives has yielded both better support but also better field sales performance.
With this preface, thank you for considering us for this award and thank you for your time in judging this nomination.
- Briefly describe the nominated individual: history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 165 words used.
Rowan Rozanski is a seven year veteran of Sales Partnerships. She leads our IS/operations sales support division of three individuals supporting hundreds of field personnel. Typically, IS support teams are narrowly focused on tech support and provisioning hardware for new personnel. Rowan's team has added responsibilities tied to technology education and training as well as budget responsibilities tied to keeping the department as efficient and cost effective as possible. This has to be done supporting a wide variety of systems (many unique to SPI) while ensuring those systems seamlessly communicate with disparate client systems.
Rowan goes outside of those boundaries, however. She routinely is involved in providing insights into marketing, sales performance, and business development. Possessing a strong understanding of sales, her input has been instrumental in driving better performance and even developing new sales avenues in existing client programs.
Rowan works both managing a team of 3 as well as actively providing sales operations support directly.
More details on achievements in the following section.
- Outline the nominee's achievements since July 1 2020 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 243 words used.
Over the course of 2022, the SPI support team was able to streamline the onboarding process to the point where SPI was able to hire 126 sales reps for the year, with an average time to hire of 6 business days and 2.3 agent onboards per day as the team ramped back up from the covid impacts of 2020 and 2021.
The team completed our migration from an office-centric hybrid model to a more remote friendly sales management model as a key business strategy.
Blended internally developed systems with external SAAS providers
Pivoted our reporting and analytics platform from a behind the firewall solution to a secure portal that can be accessed easily from the field or home office without sacrificing security or fidelity of the data.
Rowan and her team repurposed and redesigned systems for a growing B2C client helped SPI to greatly reduce cancel rates. The net results were a reduction by 1/3 in cancel rates down to 10.1% from the team KPI of 14% and 20% below industry average of 30%.
Optimize SPI’s territory management tools for the client, putting the right sales rep in front of the right customer. This, in turn, drove SPI to exceed quota for the year by:
- 109.2% sales against goal
- 149.1% increase in door-opens between Q1 and Q4
The above achievements would not have been possible without the dedication, professionalism, and hard work of Rowan and her sales support team.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 82 words used.
The following attachments and links are included to support Rowan's nomination:
● Case study detailing the field work performed in the B2C program where her team drove down cancel rates while raising production
● Documentation on SPI’s Territory Management Suite the sales operations team integrates with every sales platform we use
● Link to the SPI homepage for more information about our organization
Thank you again for your time and consideration for Sales Partnerships for the Top Field Sales Team in America.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the nominee's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 226 words used.
Expectations have changed for both new sales reps entering the workforce and for sales leaders trying to navigate the changing marketplace. What sets Sales Partnerships apart from our competitors is our ability to work efficiently and effectively in a remote environment while exceeding goals and ramping up new sales rep through a streamlined onboarding and sales ramp process. Many organizations struggle with getting enough facetime for their reps and are cutting back on the size of their sales teams. Sales Partnerships is very much an outlier in our ability to grow productive teams that surpass quota in a challenging environment.
Improving sales onboarding systems, territory planning systems, and adding the additional sales staff were all key business priorities and the operations team exceeded expectations, while also facilitating the established fields teams to overperform quota.
The support environment for sales in 2022 was unusually challenging. With a thinner experienced sales candidate pool proportionate to the population since the 1940's, SPI hired more individuals new to the profession than ever before
Rowan led the efforts to streamline and target new personnel technology training to adapt to a population of individuals less experienced with sales tools. The success of that effort can be measured in improved tool adoption rates compared to prior years and fewer support calls related to training related issues (despite being a less experienced sales population.)
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