Kimball Midwest is a wholesaler/distributor in the the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) products business. The company’s MMS (Materials Management System) Program and processes systematically deliver the Kimball Midwest Experience to customers, creating efficiency and reducing the overall cost of doing business. The MMS Program was designed to help sales managers effectively provide customers with an effective means of controlling costs incurred by the purchase of MRO supplies.
An essential element of this program is the MMS Champion—a manager or key account executive selected by a division manager or director of Sales to lead MMS training of other sales managers, and to uphold standardization of the train-the-trainer MMS training they receive.
Program Details
The MMS Program is a planned, methodical, ongoing process in which professional Kimball Midwest sales representatives identify customers’ needs from the customer’s point of view. This tool helps penetrate accounts, gain SKU’s, and grow cornerstone accounts (accounts that average more than $2,000 in sales per month).
Kimball Midwest has successfully trained 32 MMS Champions via in-person training classes. They are now subject matter experts on the MMS Program. MMS Champions host trainings and provide essential guidance and support to their teams. Along with the 32 MMS Champions, Kimball Midwest trained an additional 139 of its core managers on this program.
A variety of content and materials were created to support the MMS Program. These include user guides, training videos, and tracking visualizations created in Power BI to support all core sales managers in hitting their goals. A big win for this program was developing a better customer-facing presentation that the company calls KM360. A KM360 is presented to the customer to help identify the customer’s pain points and how best to provide the customer with solutions to increase their shops’ efficiencies.
One of the ways Kimball Midwest evaluates the program is by using its 4-3-2-1 method, which is the Monthly Core Manager minimum expected monthly performance on the attainment of four KM360 Presentations, three Customer Surveys, two Final MMS Presentations, and one Qualified Win. This is tracked using Power BI, which allows the company to document the incremental growth of customer accounts and track the overall MMS Process.
Utilizing Power BI, the company can create visual reports and dashboards for class members and company leaders to view results from this training program. This also assists in the class follow-up calls where manager activity is available to view and track.
The MMS Champions program is reinforced in the short term by requiring attendees to participate in monthy conference calls after the class to review progress they have made in training others and sales progress for their selected target accounts. They also share successes and struggles they have been encountering for discussion and guidance from class instructors and fellow attendees.
Results
More than 86 percent of core sales managers have been trained on this program, above the company’s 75 percent goal.
In terms of business impact, the company picked up 724 new cornerstone accounts, resulting in a significant uptick in sales.
