Gem Vending testimonial transcript

Hello, my name is Nicola Hill. I'm the Sales and Marketing Director for Gem Vending Ltd. We had an internal telesales ourselves and the girl was very successful.

It took us a long time to find her, but she proved herself to be very successful. And we had a period when we were short on sales so we put her out in the field and she became equally successful out in the field doing field sales and it left us a gap.

For me, recruitment in that area has been very difficult in the past so we looked at outsourcing at that point. I've been with the company for 21 years and during that time we've used two or three different agencies and what we've found with them is that they've never really understood what we are as a company.

The Straightahead team didn’t just go out there for appointments. It wasn't a numbers game of getting as many appointments as possible because appointments that aren't qualified appointments aren't valuable or are just a waste of my salespeople's time.

So it was very much a relationship sale. If it's appropriate now we'll have an appointment, but if it's not appropriate now, when is it appropriate? I really like that because it saves me time as well as money.

The consultative approach, and not the hard sell approach, I like that. That's how we sell as a company, so it matched what we're about.

As the relationship continued, it felt like they were part of our team selling our products. The delivery has been great. It's been exactly as was promised. The feedback's been good. It has been a partnership. There have been times when we've given feedback, but it's always been taken on board and the next round has been better every time.

So, it's very much been a partnership and listening to each other's needs. The most important part was to manage our integrity. We didn't make promises that we couldn't keep for the sake of getting appointments. We definitely got some quality business coming through because of that. And what we've also got is relationships to take forwards.

Straightahead's reporting is very good. We always got the reports on the day that we were promised the reports, and they were always accurate and distributed exactly as we were promised.