Beech Tree Private Equity hosted its inaugural Growth Forum bringing together the CEO's and directors of our portfolio companies along with three guest speakers who have worked with a number of fast growing businesses including previous investments of ours.

The overall theme of the day was how to accelerate sales growth with focus around; building Sales departments that operate like well-oiled machines, picking the right sales people, motivating sales teams and maximising sales conversion and operational efficiencies.

The speakers on the day included Michael Finnigan of i2i. Michael and his team specialise in coaching; high-performance business leaders, executive boards, sales teams and successful sports people. Having worked with Michael on numerous occasions and seen the impact he has had on the management teams he has worked with, we thought he would be the right person to kick the event off. The focus of his presentation was about 'getting the right people on the bus and making sure their attitudes/values are right.'

Tony Bolland was the next presenter. Tony has built three very successful sales departments in Viastorm, Appsense and Avecto using the same methodology in each case. We asked Tony to come along because in our view if you achieve success once there is an argument to say luck may have played a part, twice you may be on to something, but if it works a third time - we feel it's worth taking note of how he did it! With most of our portfolio being B2B businesses the CEO's were hooked on what he had to say regarding building a sales machine that can grow sales in excess of 50% per annum.

Gez Groom of Cowry consulting, a specialist in behavioural science, gave the final presentation and while the techniques he deploys involve a fair degree of understanding of how the human brain works, many of the exercises he put the group through were fun and delivered some surprising results. He then talked through how Cowry have applied these techniques successfully in growing sales and improving operational efficiencies across a number of companies using numerous case studies. Having successfully worked with Cowry before on reducing friction in customer journeys, which resulted in increased sales conversions, we were keen to see where else their techniques could help our businesses.

Overall, the day was very enjoyable and produced much food for thought for our management teams, with each team taking a number of albeit different things from the day.

We have included a couple of video clips from the day.

Michael Finnigan CEO & Founder i2i

 

Jez Groom CEO & Founder Cowry Consulting