As your company begins to grow and expand and even take on a new direction, it’s essential to have the right leadership in place. Not only will these leaders help execute company goals, but they will also help shape the culture of your company.
If you want to be intentional about the culture of your team, you need to be intentional about who you hire.
Below is a case study from one of our valued clients. This presentation will show you how their sales culture was positively impacted when using Naviga Recruiting to help them find a top-performing sales leader.
Background
USA Funds was preparing to launch a new division in early 2016. The nonprofit, money management and student success company created a new division called Student Connections to provide a SaaS e-learning platform for higher education institutions.
Craig Anderson, the President of this newly formed division, felt strongly that this new business needed a culture that was different from the student loan-centric one that served their traditional business.
He decided to go outside the company, and potentially outside the industry, to find a Sales leader who could drive high growth while creating a cohesive culture for the sales team.
Why a Culture Shift
USA Funds has a history in the student loan industry and has served more than 22 million students and parents with more than $250 billion in financial aid.
When Craig Anderson first joined the company as the Senior Vice President of Business Development in 2014, the company primarily used the commodity/relationship selling model common to the student loan industry.
With the planned shift to an e-Learning SaaS platform supporting student training and success preparation at Student Connections, the company needed to build a solution sales approach common in the tech and software industry.
“I wanted to think outside of the student loan world and bring in experience from other industries and with different personal and professional networks,” Anderson says.
Finding an Executive Search Partner
As soon as Anderson made the decision to hire an outsider sales leader, he knew his own network of contacts would not be sufficient to find the best person, and he didn’t have the time to build a new network.
He also felt his own internal team would not be enough in this search.
“As a smaller company”, he said, “we didn’t have an HR army to do all the recruiting for us. We just didn’t have the people or time to do initial screenings, or really understand the type of person we were looking to hire.”
Anderson decided to seek out an executive search firm.
After reaching out to many executive search firms and evaluating the benefits of each, Anderson chose to form a partnership with Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search.
Naviga’s appeal was the boutique nature of the firm. “I dealt directly with Naviga’s owners when trying to decide which firm to choose, and throughout the recruiting process. They leveraged their years of experience specializing in sales executive search to help me flush out the requirements of this critical hire,” he said.
It also helped that USA Funds had prior success using Naviga to find talented sales professionals.
The Right Person for the Role
Naviga’s Executive Recruiting team utilized its proven search process to assess hundreds of candidates before presenting 7 candidates from many different industries to Student Connections for evaluation.
Naviga provided strategic consultation throughout the process – from requirements to interviewing to offer negotiation.
By the end of the process, Anderson was confident in the selection of candidates he reviewed and ultimately chose Steve Queisser as his Vice President of Sales and Strategic Partnerships.
After hiring Steve, there was no doubt that he was the right person for the role. Right out of the gate, Steve worked with the existing sales team and brought a cohesive focus to their efforts on landing initial accounts for the new products.
He worked with the team to adjust their methodologies and build a cadence for the sales team that matched the new solution sales environment they faced with their partner institutions.
Employee engagement surveys show a dramatic improvement within the sales team and Student Connections is on track to hit its aggressive growth targets as well.
Craig Anderson’s vision of a new culture and business model, combined with Steve Queisser’s leadership in building the necessary sales environment for success in the SaaS e-Learning market has Student Connections poised for greatness.
Is Naviga’s Executive Search Right For You?
If you’re looking to make a change in your business or diversify into a new market, hiring outside leadership may be just what your company needs to reach your desired goals.
Using an Executive Search partner like Naviga is valuable in that it allows you to focus on running your business while relying on a dedicated specialist with a large network of executives and years of experience to lead the search for your next sales leader.
“To move your company in a new direction from where it’s been before, you need someone that’s outside your network and possibly outside your industry. That’s where we got a lot of value from hiring Naviga as our sales Executive Search Firm. They were able to cast a wide net and gave us the confidence to know we were finding the best sales leader we could. We got exactly what we were hoping for,” said Anderson.
