Ceo The Phone Co-Op
Chipping Norton & Manchester
The Phone Coop was in a bit of a pickle when I joined, with material losses each month, too many people in the wrong jobs and no discernible strategy.I had to start with a combination of organisational design and stakeholder management as well as introducing a series of operational processes that standardised customer experience.Once we had got ourselves sorted out I switched focus to upskilling the SMT through coaching and mentoring and creating consumer & B2B sales strategies.With the consumers we introduced a Social Media Sales channel that rapidly created a cost of acquisition model at around 50% of the prevailing market average, and could be flexed to our capacity to onboard, which we got up to 500 over the first quarter.With B2B it was a case of identifying our sweet spot in the verticals, co-ordinating internal and external sales efforts and driving it hard.The smartest tricks I pulled were prescribing a formal account management process, which the team hated until they realised how straightforward upsells were with it, and introducing an integrated Telecoms & IT service.Alongside these commercial steps I also facilitated a merger with a large food co-operative (Midcounties) whose 700,000 members offered low hanging fruit for consumer sales and whose energy business offered the opportunity for an integrated Utilities strategy.