Officeworks is a chain of Australian office supplies stores operated under the parent company Wesfarmers.

For over 25 years, Officeworks has been passionate about helping their customers make bigger things happen at home, school and work. As Australia’s home for office supplies, furniture, technology and student supplies, its focus is to deliver a wide range, low prices and excellent service to its customers.

Beyond office supplies, their extensive product range includes art supplies, facilities supplies, education resources and helpful services such as print and copy and on-site tech support through Geeks2U.

Officeworks has 167 stores Australia-wide, offers more than 40,000 products on their website, and has business specialists in store and in their national call centre to deliver excellent service to their customers regardless of how they shop.

The Challenge

In 2017, the Officeworks Business Channel approached The Sales Doctor with the challenge of moving their annual revenue from $150M to $500M by 2022.

  • At the time, Officeworks didn’t have a clear pathway or strategy to achieve this target.
  • There was a sense of frustration from the business leaders and recognition that a paradigm shift in how they did business needed to occur.

The Objective

The main objective of the scope of work was to encourage a shift in behaviour across the Officeworks Business Channel so that the business could meet the revenue target of $500M.

The Sales Doctor designed a comprehensive 3-year bespoke program to meet all the internal and external objectives of Officeworks.

The Process

Year-One

Moving the sales team from:

  • Price to value focussed
  • Transactional to relationship building
  • Instinct to insight-led
  • Being reactive to having a staged approach to engagement

Year-Two

Moving the sales team from:

  • Behaving like sales representatives to consulting with clients
  • Focusing only on the top line to being commercially driven

Year-Three

Moving the sales team from:

  • Consulting with customers to become long-term business partners
  • Partaking in busy activity to systematically realise customer’s growth potential 

This program was executed nationally via workshops and sales leadership coaching with teams.

Officeworks teams were armed with several templates and tools, allowing them to integrate learnings into their roles.

The Outcome

Due to the consistent behaviour shifts and integration of focussed learnings throughout the business, revenue for the Officeworks Business Channel moved from $150M to $500M by 2021.

Officeworks achieved its revenue targets one year ahead of expectations. The program was considered a huge success.

What They Say

“Ingrid has worked closely with me, my leaders and their teams (National Business Team) to transform how we show up with our clients. Initially, our focus was on shifting from being transactional to being relationship driven, and then the next phase was to create a commercial sales approach. When COVID hit, Ingrid developed and facilitated programs on Webex for our teams and leaders to help them build approaches to support the transition from face-to-face customer meetings to phone and video. We could implement our 90-day plan, which enabled us to smash our revenue and new account targets. While WFH could be cited as a factor, that would mean our competitors would naturally have benefited too, but they didn’t. We won greater market share because of our connected approach. We were well placed to read the room and respond due to the work we did with The Sales Doctor.”

Mark Kindness – Head of Business to Business – Officeworks