We had been sitting in a Proks conference room in Riga for about an hour when one of their senior leaders said, very calmly, that their sales operation was running on luck.
He did not say it as a cry for help. He said it the way you might describe the weather. A fact about the business that everyone inside the company had made peace with.
The pattern, he explained, had been showing up in every quarter’s numbers for years. Deals that should have been routine kept leaning on whichever rep happened to be good that day. Lose that rep for a week, and a forecasted close slipped. No single failure was dramatic. Every one of them was predictable.
It was the most honest thing a client had told me in a long time. It also told me Proks did not need the thing they had invited us in to build.
Proks sells computer components, home appliances, TVs, and other consumer electronics into 62 countries across five continents. The business was founded in Riga in 1992 and has grown on reputation: accurate, on time, trusted. They have roughly 100 people on staff. From the outside, the company looks like a model for how a mid-sized distributor scales international trade. From the inside, every opportunity was being carried by individuals.
They had asked us to build a CRM.
Why we put the software on the shelf
We asked leadership for a week to look at the structure before we scoped any software. A CRM is an easy thing to sell a client in Proks’s situation. Efficiency numbers go up. Process looks tidier. The contract closes faster.
The shape of the sales department was the actual bottleneck. One team was trying to do three very different jobs at once, and the best reps were the ones who happened to switch between all three well.
Every rep was hunting, chasing new markets. Every rep was closing, pushing signed agreements across the line. Every rep was farming, nursing the long distributor relationships that produced the backbone of the revenue. Each of those jobs rewards a different instinct. Each of them breaks at a different point. When you mix them inside one role, the people who are best at one of them pick up the slack for the ones who struggle with the other two, and the company quietly ends up depending on a handful of individuals to hold the whole thing together.
Any CRM we installed on top of that would have accelerated the dependency.
The restructure
We worked with Proks leadership for a few weeks on the redesign. The eventual shape was simple, and it borrowed a piece of shorthand every sales team has heard. Hunters. Closers. Farmers.
Hunters took on new markets. They live for the first meeting and the qualified opportunity. Once a deal crosses a threshold, they hand it off.
Closers picked up from there. Commercial negotiation, contract, signature. Their job is to get the deal done cleanly and leave nothing undone for the next person.
Farmers took ownership of the long relationship. Distributors, wholesalers, retailers who buy from Proks year after year. The kind of relationship where one lost account is six months of revenue.
It reads obvious on paper. What made it work at Proks was the translation layer underneath it: an organisational chart that named every handover point between the three roles, flagged every place where self-service for distributors would offload routine work, and identified the specific hires Proks would need to fill the gaps.
Phase two
We came back a few months later to help with implementation. We advised on the hiring plan, helped leadership onboard the first hunters into markets that had been underworked for years, and sat alongside the team as a proprietary self-service portal for distributors was built in-house.
The portal was the interesting bit. Proks’s distributors needed to check stock, place orders, and track shipments on their own. Building that inside Proks let the farmers spend their time on the parts of the relationship that actually compound value.
What changed
By the end of the engagement, sales at Proks looked different from the inside. Three clear motions, run by three different kinds of people, connected by handovers everyone could point to on a chart. The dependency on individual heroes dropped. Deals stopped stalling when someone went on holiday. The hunters pushed into new markets without being pulled back to service old accounts.
The CRM conversation came back eventually. By then there was a shape underneath it for software to sit on.
The part we tell other clients
A lot of consultancies would have taken the original CRM budget and delivered a CRM. It is the easy sell. The incentive is there.
Our read, looking back: the CRM request was a symptom. Sales felt unreliable. Leadership wanted a system that would make it reliable. A CRM was the nearest thing they could point at. Delivering one would have automated the thing they were actually worried about.
Sometimes the right tool is software. Sometimes it is a whiteboard and a hiring plan. We will tell you which one you need before we sell you either.
– Jeff.