VOW Wholesale continues to re-affirm its commitment to put resellers at the heart of its business by restructuring its sales operations, so it can be more responsive to customer needs.

VOW Wholesale, the UK’s largest business products and facilities supplies wholesaler, now has a sales structure encompassing nine account directors, four field-based business development managers and five internal account managers, focusing on telesales.

Following the restructure, every VOW Wholesale reseller will be contacted regularly by their own dedicated account manager. This individual will be responsible for working with the customer to increase their sales through creating opportunities and ensuring the overall relationship is maximised.

The restructure is the first significant task undertaken by Lisa Hainsworth, who joined VOW Wholesale as sales operations director at the beginning of the year. She was previously with global technology company Xerox, where she worked for seven years, formally the last three years as European sales operations director, heading eight team leaders and over 20 sales people in a role covering 15 countries. While at Xerox, she undertook the company’s renowned management development programme, which developed and fine-tuned her leadership skills.

Outlining the reasons for the changes, Lisa said: “Our sales framework had changed little over two decades. This had left us with a top-heavy, ‘one size fits all’ structure that meant resellers sometimes found it hard to get responses from us. We had a culture which involved certain questions being pushed up the line or to somebody else, so major decisions were regularly taken quite slowly.
“We therefore needed to take a step back, look at what our customers were telling us, assess how we were structured and amend our approach.
“We now have a flatter framework, with authorisation, power and accountability devolved, and are putting the right people in front of the right customers. We’re therefore much more flexible, can address the issues resellers actually want us to deal with and are able to make decisions far quicker, so we can be most effective in helping customers increase their sales.”

Explaining the reorganisation’s timing, Lisa stressed that VOW Wholesale wanted to finalise this early, rather than have it continuing further into the year, so the company could move on to implementing subsequent step changes in its reseller engagement and contact strategy without delay.

The sales team restructure follows directly last month’s announcement of a new VOW Wholesale Senior Management team, including experienced experts on areas such as merchandising and marketing, operations, commercial matters, customer experience and managed services, on which Lisa also sits. The sales reorganisation is the first in a series of major initiatives to be announced which its members will oversee.

The Senior Teams ’ unveiling, in turn, followed VOW Wholesale’s recent announcement that it now has complete autonomy from other companies within the EVO Group of companies, allowing full focus on the resellers and driving growth for the future.

VOW Wholesale continues to pursue a three-pronged overall strategy, as it strives to become a world-class wholesaler with resellers at the heart of its business. It aims to achieve this by improving resellers’ experience of its organisation, creating opportunities for them to sell more, and being easier for them to deal with through innovation. There will be some exciting developments announced shortly on improving the experience with VOW Wholesale from Nikki Todd, Customer Experience Director.