Building a self-employed direct sales force from scratch
Middletons, a leading UK provider of mobility products with an established network of retail showrooms, recognised the need to expand their reach to better serve their customers. To achieve this, they sought to build a national direct sales force that could provide personalised in-home consultations and product demonstrations.
Middletons needed to rapidly scale their direct sales team from just 4 employees to 40 within a year. This ambitious growth plan required a strategic and efficient recruitment process.
To meet this challenge, Citrus Connect implemented a robust recruitment plan using the Citrus Framework:
Targeted Profiling: As the sales representatives began to perform, we profiled the top 10 performers to identify key traits and ensure we were consistently interviewing and hiring the right people.
Workforce Planning: We created a workforce planning tool to forecast hiring needs, taking into account Middletons’ pace of growth, conversion rates at each recruitment stage, geographical needs, and average time to hire.
Process Optimisation: We refined Middletons’ recruitment process to ensure efficiency and a positive candidate experience.
Within 12 months, we successfully helped Middletons build a 45-strong direct sales force, exceeding their initial target. This allowed their managers to focus on business growth, training, coaching, and problem-solving, while we took the recruitment burden off their shoulders.
Reduced Time-to-Hire: The average time to hire was reduced to just 14 days.
High Offer Rate: By interviewing only informed, quality candidates, we achieved a 70% offer rate from interviews and a 63% offer-to-start rate.
With a successful and expanding direct sales force in place, Middletons is well-positioned to achieve its ambitious growth targets.
We asked Ricky Towler, Founder of Middletons, to share his experience working with Citrus Connect:
Communication with the citrus team has been nothing short of exemplary. They are passionate, resourceful and determined. So far, they've recruited at least 10 candidates on our behalf with many more in the pipeline. The decision to work with Citrus has not only saved my business an awful lot of time and effort, it has also improved the quality of candidates within the sales force.
Ricky Towler - Founder, Middletons
When Sales Designer retention became an issue, we had to start with recruitment.
A pilot so successful that Citrus Connect Recruitment now handle 100% of our sales recruitment.
CV DROP OFF ⮁
