Get your people moving forward
As she was getting her people to support the company’s actions to combat the downturn, Krings made some uncommon moves to spark some momentum: Travel Solutions hired three salespeople and expanded its product line.
While it may seem counterintuitive, the initiatives came as part of a Growth 360 initiative that Krings led that took a look at all the internal efficiencies of the company, including a new building lease.
A quality review like that starts with a basic question: What is the core business you are in and how are you doing in that? The answer led to hires and cuts for Travel Solutions, as Krings and her leadership team found some inefficiency in their processes and also some opportunity to expand sales with clients by adding products they should have already been using.
“It seemed counterintuitive even on the inside, when we’re saying we’re going to reduce staff but we’re going to hire salespeople, so one of the things we knew we had to do was secure additional business,” Krings says. “We’re a transaction-oriented business, so if our sales are down, our transactions are down. If our transactions are down, we need more of them.”
But when you want to make a move like that in a bad cycle, you have to do it a little more carefully and with a little more thrift. While Krings didn’t want to share the exact model Travel Solutions used, she says she hired extremely seasoned salespeople and their pay scale was heavily performance-based.
“What we found out there is the sales folks who were confident in their capabilities were accepting of a creative compensation program, so we basically have a pay-per-performance type of program, all of them have the ability to make a lot
more money than I do,” she says.
Krings says that model did exactly what it was intended to do: turned off middle-of-the-road candidates and kept costs low.
“As soon as we mentioned pay-per-performance, if they started to gloss over, it was like, ‘OK, you can leave,’” she says. “I could tell it was a confidence issue.”
While Krings says it’s too early to call the hirings a roaring success, because Travel Solutions’ sales cycle is so long, the results thus far have been solid, and she says the company has built a heavy pipeline of business in a time when many travel companies are going under.
