The Beautiful Game
Let’s Play Sports was founded in 1987 by a group of inclusive and competitive people committed to helping others create meaningful relationships through the shared passion for playing soccer. They currently own and operate indoor soccer facilities in Colorado, Texas, Utah, Idaho, Kansas, Oklahoma, California, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio and are continuing to expand their soccer programs to new states and regions. Let’s Play Sports helps build and maintain quality indoor soccer facilities, provide referees and rules, and handles all administrative/business tasks related to running a successful soccer league and program.
Lacking Strikers
Gary Archer, the President and CEO of Let’s Play Sports was introduced to our process when he participated in a Topaz sales hiring interview with Jorge. In that interview, he quickly realized that the Metahire process exposed major flaws in his current hiring process and was faster and more accurate for screening candidates for sales expertise. Their ideal candidate needs a solid combination of sales, management, and operations experience, but their process was falling short on delivering hires with sales skills specifically. Gary recognized a need for a change in his sales recruitment process and also acknowledged that over five years’ worth of previous, less-than-ideal hires now needed comprehensive sales training to catch up.
The Throw-In
The Let’s Play Sports team enrolled in our Metahire Sales Hiring System and our Buyer Facilitator by Topaz sales training to become a more dynamic, efficient sales and recruitment organization. Our solutions included:
- Getting all managers to participate in sales training and sales leadership training
- Teaching sales leaders to hold their teams accountable
- Providing live sales hiring training for their corporate hiring team to reduce the hiring time and find better overall candidates
- Offering online training through our Learning Management System (LMS) to offer courses to their nationwide teams across different time zones
- Focusing on the buyer facilitator concept throughout their sales process with live training that helped them uncover customer pain points and needs
- Practicing and rehearsing different scenarios through dedicated role-play activities and exercises designed to help sales reps connect with prospects and become trusted advisors
- Making the sales process less outcome-based to ensure it doesn’t come across as pushy or salesy
- Asking better questions while communicating with their prospects and customers
- Creating connections by actively listening and diving deeper into meaningful conversations
The Game Winner
Before working with Topaz in 2019, Let’s Play Sports had been experiencing a noticeable decrease in sales, ultimately leading them to work with us. After enrolling in the program, we prepared their team to launch a new sales process, but with the nationwide shutdowns throughout 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they, unfortunately, couldn’t reap the rewards of our training quite yet. However, the results were immediately noticeable upon reopening to full capacity in 2021.
Compared to the industry-wide average customer retention rate of around 50%, Let’s Play Sports retained its customers at an average of 90%. Within twelve months of opening their doors after a year-plus of being closed, their sales figures had significantly exceeded their pre-COVID figures by over $600,000. Nine of their stores had record-breaking years and continued to expand their presence in various markets.
Promotion
“I spent over three years researching hiring systems and even took a class with a guy who helped interview candidates for the CIA. What I have discovered is that the Topaz system is superior because it provides the same results in half the time. As for sales training, I have never come across a system that focuses on being curious and understanding the buyer vs. trying to sell all the time. All of the Topaz products are superior to anything I have seen because they focus on the person and not the process.”
-Gary Archer – President & CEO at Let’s Play Sports
