Skip to content
Aplora
Manufacturing
Aplora Sales

Client under NDA

The best salesperson's playbook rolled out across a manufacturer's whole sales team

A manufacturer with a long B2B cycle: a deal runs for weeks, more than one person signs off, and output depends on what the lines are loaded with. The name is under NDA.

Published: 2026-09-04 · updated: 2026-09-04

A production floor: two workers at a bench going through a batch of goods.
Illustrative photo of the working context, not a screenshot of the client's system

  • Conversion to a sale three months after rollout

    +25%

  • Conversion to a sale after six months

    +72%

In short

  • Problem: the team's result rests on two people, and nobody can explain the gap in terms of actions.
  • Solution: every conversation reviewed against criteria derived from the leaders' practice, a personal review for each rep and a team-wide picture for the head of sales.
  • Result: conversion up 25% after three months and 72% after six (client figures).
  • Systems: CRM, telephony.

Context

  • A manufacturer selling B2B through a sales team; name and segment under NDA.
  • Process volume: inbound and outbound deals with a long cycle and several people involved in the decision.
  • Team: a sales department with a head; two reps consistently closed several times more than the rest.
  • Systems: the client's CRM and telephony.
  • The constraint became visible after new hires came in: they did not reach quota, and onboarding rested on retelling successful cases.

Baseline

Baseline metrics with their sources. Without them, any later result has nothing to be compared against.
Losses$51,000

The client's own estimate of deals lost during the assessment period

  • No access to the decision-maker
  • Qualifying data not collected
  • No next step agreed
  • Objections left unanswered
  • The call is never reviewed afterwards
  • Before the work started we fixed: conversion to a sale for the team and per rep, the share of deals with an agreed next step, and the share of conversations that reached the decision-maker.
  • Data source: the client's CRM exports and call recordings.
  • The comparison stayed within the same funnel: neither the offer nor the deal sources changed over the period.
  • There are no measurement dates, formula or approving owner behind the numbers, so they are published as results reported by the client.

Diagnosis

Which hypotheses were considered, why this one was chosen, what was assumed, and the condition under which we would have stopped.
  • Three hypotheses were considered: too few deals at the top, a weak offer, or a difference in how the conversation is run.
  • The third was chosen: there were enough deals, and the spread in conversion at comparable workload pointed to a difference in actions.
  • Assumption: the leaders' practice is reproducible. Checked against historical recordings — conversations that ended in a deal did more often reach the decision-maker and close a next step.
  • Stop criterion: if reviewing against the criteria does not separate conversations with a deal from those without, the hypothesis is considered unconfirmed and the work stops.
  • Twenty constraints were recorded in the report in total; one was taken into work first.

What we implemented

  • Review criteria assembled from the practice of the two team leaders and agreed with the head of sales.
  • Every conversation reviewed against those criteria with example lines rather than a general score.
  • A personal review for each rep: what worked, what was missed, which next step to practise.
  • A team summary for the head of sales: where exactly deals are lost and by whom.
  • An automatic conversation summary and a next step with a due date in the CRM.

How the process changed

Before

4 steps
  1. A conversation takes place
  2. The rep writes down what they remember in the CRM
  3. The head of sales listens to a sample of recordings
  4. Training is retelling successful cases at the standup

After

5 steps
  1. A conversation takes place
  2. It is reviewed against the methodology criteria
  3. A summary and a next step with a due date land in the CRM
  4. The rep gets a personal review
  5. The head of sales gets a team summary

What was stuck

The team's result rested on two people; the rest closed several times less on the same workload. Nobody knew what exactly the leaders did differently: conversations were not reviewed, and the gap was explained away as “experience”.

  1. 1A conversation takes place
  2. 2It is reviewed against the methodology criteria
  3. 3A summary and a next step with a due date land in the CRM
  4. 4The rep gets a personal review
  5. 5The head of sales gets a team summary
  6. Measured result

Results

Conversion to a sale three months after rollout

+25%

Reported by: Client figures: compared with the pre-rollout period in the same funnel

Conversion to a sale after six months

+72%

Reported by: Client figures: compared with the pre-rollout period in the same funnel

Economic impact

  • The client estimated the losses over the assessment period at $51,000 in deals not closed — their estimate on their own funnel, not our calculation.
  • The main line of the effect is closing the gap between the leaders and the rest: with the same deal flow, the team closes more.
  • Cost of ownership: model calls scale with the number of conversations, plus upkeep of the CRM and telephony integrations.

Adoption

  • The review is addressed to the rep, not only to their manager: a leaderboard for management gets rejected within a month.
  • The criteria come from their own leaders' practice rather than an external framework — the team recognises itself in them.
  • The solution owner on the client side is the head of sales.
«Even before we rolled out Aplora Sales, the assessment report showed us what our best salespeople actually do differently. We set out to scale that across the whole team, so that every rep works like the best one. The result did not keep us waiting: three months after the rollout conversion was up 25%, and after six months — 72%. And that was only one of the twenty constraints Aplora pointed out to us.»

Client under NDA — Commercial director, manufacturing (NDA)

What's next

  • Take the next of the twenty constraints recorded in the report into work.
  • Fix the full evidence base — period, formula and approving owner — to move the numbers from “as reported by the client” to verified.

Have a similar workflow? Let's check whether the hypothesis transfers

Another company's result is not a promise. It does show where to look.

All cases