Sales Partnerships Inc. - Sales Operations Professional of the Year

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: Erin Nichols, Technical Team Lead

The amazing staff at Sales Partnerships, Inc (SPI) fuel our ability to provide field-based turn-key sales outsourcing, contract sales, and brand engagement services for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.

Erin Nichols serves as Technical Team Lead at Sales Partnerships, Inc. She leads our software development and backend teams supporting our many clients. She consistently goes the extra mile to ensure that best practices are maintained and that our clients are provided with the best in class service that SPI is known for. Her outstanding attention to detail and exacting requirements are the driving force behind her team’s many successes, a few of which are outlined below.

Highlighted Achievements

Customized SPI’s awarding winning territory management tools for a new B2C client resulting in exceeding program KPIs
Led a team that completed our migration from an office-centric hybrid model to a more remote friendly sales management model for analytics and reporting
Led a software development effort that repurposed our data visualization tools for use by epidemiologists working to end the Covid-19 pandemic

More details on achievements in the following sections.

Erin Nichol's background was perfectly suited for Sales Partnerships' analytical and technical approach to sales. With Master's degrees in mathematics and computer science, the typical career roadmap with that skill set would either be teaching at a collegic level (which she did for a few years) or moving into analytics in the insurance industry.

SPI headhunted her to lead a development that would create groundbreaking new technology and alogrythms to optimize sales performance. Her work at SPI as a lead developer and head of analytics has led to SPI's winning several industry awards include technology innovation and best use of technology in sales Stevie awards.

Her ability to repurpose and redesign systems for our new B2C client helped SPI to:

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 Q2

Erin’s unique understanding of the team’s dynamics and behaviors paired with her analytical skills helped to greatly reduce the cancel rate
10.1% cancel rate which is 3.9% below team KPI and 20% below industry average

Erin led our efforts to complete 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.

SPI is committed to offering low and no cost tools to epidemiologists. Erin has been the team lead on our Covid Technical Support outreach program, working with epidemiologists to add features to our Covid visualization platform to match their work processes in order to
Track disease spread in a congregate living facilities and schools using site diagrams and then show the impact of those cases in the communities where they live
Easily visualize how the disease is moving through specific segments of society

SPI blends in-house developed systems with external SAAS providers to support fully remote based sales agents and sales management teams - safely, securly, and effectively.Erin's work is critical in making these innovating solutions work.

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. As you can imagine, this is a huge undertaking and requires seamless communication within the organization to drive these initiatives forward and set the team up for success. The ability to plan, pivot, and prioritize throughout the last year was essential to the team. Erin Nichols leadership was instrumental in these projects.

While other companies are downsizing the size of their field teams,
SPI continues to utilize this important part of the workforce by adapting quickly:

Changing the market conditions and tools to suit the agents
Providing tools to increase face time and improving productivity
Nurturing new talent supporting the sales profession
Establishing a culture of giving back to the community

Expectations have changed for both new sales reps entering the workforce and for sales leaders trying to navigate the changing marketplace. Erin’s hard work helped set Sales Partnerships apart from our competitors ensuring our ability to work efficiently and effectively in a remote environment while exceeding goals. 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 and Erin was integral in making all of this possible.

Attachment 1: Systems Architecture Overview
SPI enriches our algorithms and processes with data from multiple sources. One example is The American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census.

Attachment 2: Income Level by Census Block Group
Our microservice based territory and record management system automates quick and dynamic territory updates.

Attachment 3: Data Flow Diagram
An overview of our territory management and visualization platform is available for review.

Attachment 4: 2022 SPI GIS Territory Management and Visualizatio
Attachment 5: Covid Quickview white paper describing the tool we modified to help combat Covid

Attachment 6: Case Study in Financial Services showing how this comes together to work.