In today’s competitive landscape, improving customer journeys and sales processes is key to driving business success and customer satisfaction. Michelle McGowan, head of commercial operations at G4S Cash Solutions in the United Kingdom, knows this and has made it one of her top goals. In fact, her passion for service excellence and her strategic approach to improving customer interactions has significantly impacted the company.

I had the pleasure of talking with McGowan for an episode of The Adapter’s Advantage podcast about her efforts and how they have paid off. During our conversation, she explained the transformative strategies and revenue enablement technology she has implemented to revolutionize C4S’s customer experience and sales operations.

She also shared how her background as a sales leader provided a unique perspective on the gaps in customer service. Continue reading or watch the interview below to learn how Michelle went from identifying problems to implementing comprehensive enablement solutions and persuading her sales team to adopt the new strategies and technology.

Episode 64: Enablement’s Role in Commercial Operations | Michelle McGowan

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From This Episode:

Deniz Olcay: Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us for the Adapter’s Advantage podcast. My name is Deniz Olcay. I’m vice president of marketing at Allego. And I’m thrilled to be joined today by Michelle McGowan, who is the head of commercial operations at G4S Cash Solutions. Michelle, thank you for being on the program.

Michelle McGowan: Thank you for inviting me.

I wanted to kick off with a very simple question. In your own words, how do you answer the question: what do you do? Because you do have quite an interesting role at G4S Cash Solutions.

McGowan: Essentially, I’m head of commercial operations. And that’s split into three main job roles or objectives that I have to work towards. So, pillar one is sales operations, which is broadly speaking, all of the enablement, the target setting, and the revenue strategy for the sales teams.

Then there’s customer experience, which spans the whole of G4S Cash Solutions. It’s something we have never done before in any great depth. So, I am the person making the waves there with the customer experience. So, [that involves] mapping out all of the journeys for customer experience. And within that sits the customer service team.

I also head up the marketing function. That involves all the usual marketing, from the website to lead generation, to social media and any collateral that we might need within the business.

Can you give a quick overview of G4S Cash Solutions and what are you trying to do in the market?

McGowan: We’re working in quite a mature market in the UK. We are a cash solutions business. Essentially, we offer retailers and [companies in the] banking sector solutions to manage their cash. And you can imagine that’s everything from Anne in her little tea shop all the way up to the great big global banking organizations.

In a nutshell, we deliver and collect cash from all of those organizations. We are a really pivotal player in how cash circulates throughout the UK.

Can you give our audience just a little bit more about what steps you’ve taken to improve the customer experience at G4S? Maybe a little bit about what was it before, what was your vision, and how you progressively started to really realize that vision.

I actually was a sales leader in the organization before I moved into my role. So, I was very attuned and aligned and understanding about what was missing from the customer service team. Because as a sales leader, I would be responsible for new business and existing business.

I would often hear quite a lot of horror stories about the customer service department and what they had to offer our customers and how they were servicing them. So, I would say that when I took over, there was no passion for really wanting to give service excellence and understanding that.

As a customer service executive, you might feel like your role is small, but as part of the wider massive organization that we are, and being able to play a part in the marketplace is a differentiator in the level of service that you get. It’s absolutely crucial that you’re passionate about your role and that you understand what giving good service is. Where we are going … is getting the executives to understand their role, to understand how important it is that customers feel listened to, and that at the moment that they’re speaking to them or dealing with their inquiry, that’s the only thing that matters right there and then.

It’s absolutely crucial that you’re passionate about your role and that you understand what giving good service is. — Michelle McGowan

The customer service team has the ability to review and understand what that looks like and what that feels like. And I suppose my vision came from my own personal experience. Where do I go where I feel absolutely wonderful when I walk out of the door or after I’ve stopped talking to someone on the phone. How do I feel about that? And what does that make me? Everybody’s got the capacity to do exactly the same thing. So it’s really just trying to translate that into something more strategic and tactical that the customer service agents can understand in a plan.

How did you approach thinking about the customer journey as a way to improve customer satisfaction and experience?

McGowan: I’m still right in the middle of all of that. But what I did was I kind of started with the bones of what we actually do. So, I mapped out what if I were a G4S customer right now, what would I experience? And I started mapping out the main journeys into the sales team and then through to sales mobilization and then into the support functions. And then I broke it down into, now I’m a customer who wants this, or now I’m a customer that has this particular problem. How do we respond to that as a business? What does that customer go through and how do we respond? The next stage of that is to ask our customers directly, get feedback from them on what experience they believe so that we’re not looking at it one dimensionally.

And then, I know it’s bandied around a lot, but if I was to pick the creme de la creme of experiences, what would that look like? And now I’m left with how do I fill the gaps? I’d like to dig into a little bit about the sales aspect, right? So getting your sellers ready to adopt this change. How did you get them to embrace maybe this new vision in terms of how you want it to serve the customer, both pre-sale and post-sale, whether it meant embracing new tools or adopting new learning.

I imagine there was a big cultural shift involved. Can you walk us through some of the challenges and how you approach them?

McGowan: Well, again, still challenges. We have a really experienced sales team with a lot of years under the belt. Some people have been here for over 20 years. So, the challenge I think was probably greater for me than most sales organizations where the turnover and attrition of salespeople is probably a lot higher.

G4S must be a really good place to work because people don’t like to leave.

McGowan: Lucky for me, I’m actually in the older quadrant of age groups that we work with. So, I wasn’t some young buck coming in saying this is how it should be. So I think that helped. I think they saw me. I was selling it. I was selling it. That’s what I did for a lot of my career. So I just sold it to them. Yeah, I have the credibility.

I also talked to them quite a lot about how I got sold to. So, when you want to talk about how we need to sell, you need to think about: Why did I choose this person? Why did I choose this company to give my business to? Well, that was mainly due to the sales process and what happened within those sales calls. So, I started talking about that with the sales team and started trying to motivate them and inspire them to move forward. And I also started using language and terminology and talking about technique in my everyday world. So, rather than it being something that I just drop in as a “we should be doing this,” I almost talk about it as if it is happening. … And then hopefully the behavior will start following.

What are some of the strategies that you deployed to make the learning stick or to try to shift that behavior? What different modalities of learning have you deployed to make that shift happen?

McGowan: We’ve done a sequence of face-to-face learning modules. We’ve actually got a session planned with Allego soon to reinvigorate the sales management team and just keep it all alive for them. So we kind of split it into sales management and sales users. And we have had face-to-face training sessions and showed them use cases for the enablement program that we’ve got. Also, I’ve personally set time aside to show people that I’m genuinely interested in the products that we use and in the program that I’ve put forward. So, for instance, I’ll give them tasks, such as, give me a 30-second video on how you would sell this. What do you do here? So I am quite close to the sales teams and review stuff with them quite frequently.

Again, it’s all about the direction. I’m trying to make all the water flow to the same place. So, whenever anybody asks me a question, I always go back with, “Did you try this first?” It’s kind of like being a mum and just trying to encourage them all to go to the same place.

But yeah, it’s been fun. It is still fun. There are challenges, but it’s rewarding when the right people start doing the right thing.

How do you make that case to the executive team that what you’re doing is resulting in either win rate improvement, sales cycle reduction, revenue growth, cost cutting? What are some of the business metrics that you’re focused on communicating to the business?

McGowan: As I mentioned, attrition isn’t a really strong one, but in one of our teams actually is more so.

Reasons for leaving is one of the things [we look at]. So if there are leavers, what is causing that? Is that a lack of sales enablement? Is it because they felt they didn’t have the tools to do their job? So that’s one measurement. I’m also looking at … measuring where digital sales rooms have been introduced as part of the sales process compared to where they’re not part of the sales process to see if we can work out if that is a key differentiator or contributed to where a sale is won or not. Also, we’re starting to look at the sales mobilization team and bringing that under the same banner and possibly sharing information from their sales enablement, and that leads to a post-sales survey. So we’ll be able to measure it from direct customer feedback, as well. And of course, some of it is really not very tangible in terms of [return on investment] ROI.

For example, my son is a salesman. You won’t be surprised to know he works in the city. And he’s very young. He’s only 23. And when I hear him talk about work and what is there for him, and I see him so excited about his job, ultimately it’s something I can’t really put a value on. But it’s very important. How excited are these people to work at G4S and sell the stuff that we sell? What is that experience like for them? And if a new wave of salespeople came in tomorrow, would I know that they are totally equipped to do their job and would they feel happy doing it? I think there’s a level of company responsibility towards that. And I think even though I can’t measure it financially, a happy sales team sells more stuff.

You mentioned the digital sales room capability, which is a newer type of capability in the world of sales and marketing. It’s a way for a seller to create a webpage for their deal or for their prospect. How did you introduce that new concept to the organization and how has it been received?

McGowan: I’d pick an opportunity and I’d start asking questions: “So, how did you share that and who did you share it with? Who are the main collaborators? Who are the people that you work with, the stakeholders that you’re working with on the sale?” [They’d say,] “That’s so and so.” And they would have to wrack their brains. And then I’d ask, “So, how do you get that to all those people?” “It’s on email,” they say.

Then I talked them through the disjointed way that we currently do things, which is emailing here and then emailing it to someone else. And then they might reply or they might not. And [they might say] I forget who I shared what documents with. So. I said, “Now imagine all of that is in one place and you know who’s logging in and you know who isn’t. And you’ve got a call with the finance director in a week’s time, and you know that he’s just logged in to look at your proposal six times in the last week. How confident are you feeling?”

I would make the capability of the digital sales room really relevant to stuff they already do, but just in a more enhanced way.

Michelle, thank you so much for your time. I’m just going to leave it with one last question. If you had one piece of advice or words of encouragement for our listeners who are trying to improve the customer journey or seller journey—trying to make a change–what would that be?

McGowan: Start with the end in mind. What is it you really want? What does your perfect sales experience and your salesperson look like? Then understand that there is a journey to that. Plan what that looks like and take the first step to being able to actually do that with an enablement tool, with a platform that can allow you to get there rather than it just be an idea that you’re constantly thinking about. You just gotta take the action.

Take the action, begin with the end in mind. I love it. Thanks again for being on the show. Thank you to all of our listeners and viewers. Look forward to having you potentially on our future episode. Thank you, Michelle.

McGowan: No problem. Thanks, Dennis.

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