Dave Banyard
Analyst · Wells Fargo Bank Securities. Your line is open
Yes, I think I would - given the market dynamics I would talk second half on this business for an improvement, if you will on the top line. Where we are in the cycle is, we have done a great job of recruiting so we’re past the heavy lifting on that, there is still always I think this is kind of business where you’re always going to have some churn and so we’re going to be in constant state of working on, improving our talent within the organization, that never stops in the cycle of things but the big heavy lifting on that. To put some perspective on this, we’ve had more than a third of the sales reps in the organization turnover in the past 18 months and almost half of the sales leadership turnover as well. So it’s been and - a lot of that is by performance, so it’s a hard exercise to go through and we’ve gotten through the heavy part of that. We’re deep into the tool upgrades and the training portion, we just spent a tremendous amount of time with the fields team as well as the leadership team over the past several months in terms of training and we’re continuing to rollout improvements in the tools that we provide to our sales force, our methodology is to test the tool in a couple of key sales regions, make sure it works, make sure we understand what the kinks are and work those out before we roll it out broadly. And then once we have it, to really hit it hard and roll it out broadly across the organization and that’s in process and these are technology upgrades. I mean this is a business that has been underinvested in, so you want to talk about capital investment, there is some that goes with this, it’s very small in the big scheme of things, but we have underinvested in this business from the tools and training capability standpoint and we’re rectifying that now. Unfortunately that just takes some time, you see it in the performance of the new reps. They’re hungry for information, they’re hungry for tools, they’re excited to get out and go sell, I’ve interacted with a number of them recently through our training process and they’re excited about what we’re doing but it still just takes time. I mean we sell 20,000 SKUs it’s hard to get a handle on that. So we’re broiling [ph] it down in a smaller chunks for the new folks and what’s amazing, when you do it and you really go after it in this fashion the top performers learn some things too. When I interact with them because they’re also doing a lot of the training those leaders and top performing sales reps also highlight to me that, even though they’re leading the charge, these tools are helping them as well and so we’re gaining share with them as well.