The sales problem that turned out to be a design problem.

Time to fill is measured from the brief to the person's first day of work. Outcome figures are the client's own, attributed to them by name, never our measurement. People are named as first initial and surname by house style.

The situation

Unikat Home makes physical things that people buy in large, expensive batches: the doors and windows for a building, the flooring for a whole floor of it. The company wanted to grow fast, and growth was stalling in a way that was easy to see and hard to explain. Quotes went out. Big deals did not close. The obvious reading was a sales problem, and the obvious fix was more salespeople.

They did not hire more salespeople. They asked us to work out what was actually blocking the expansion first, and then who they would need to clear it. Like DLN Medical, the engagement started before the job descriptions did.

What we found when we looked

The bottleneck was in the sales process, not the sales team.

On the large orders, buyers were not going to commit from a quote and a catalogue. Somebody spending a serious sum on doors, windows and flooring for a project wanted to see how it would look, in their building, before they signed. Unikat Home had no way to show them. Without mockups and presentation material, the big deals stalled at exactly the point where a picture would have carried them over.

Once the real constraint was clear, the staffing followed it. The first two hires were not in sales at all.

The team we built, and why each seat

• 2 3D designersLatin America

  

  Producing the mockups and presentation material that let a large order be sold: the buyer's building with Unikat's doors, windows and floors in it. This was the seat that fixed the stall. 3D design is not a role most staffing companies fill, and it is a good example of why we brief for the constraint rather than the category. Latin America is where our bench of 3D and visualisation talent is deepest.

• 2 sales development representativesKosovo

  

  Front-end pipeline. Once the large orders could be shown rather than described, the business could afford to generate more of them. The SDRs fed the top of the funnel that the designers had just unblocked at the bottom.

• 1 customer service representativeKosovo

  

  Inbound, email and the day-to-day client communication that had been landing on people who should have been selling. A quiet seat, and the one that gave the sales team its time back.

The alternatives, and why not those

Once you know the constraint is visual, there are still several ways to remove it. Here is how we weigh them for a manufacturer in Unikat Home's position. This is our reasoning, not a list of what the client considered.

• More salespeople. The instinctive fix, and the one a body-shop agency would have sold. It multiplies the number of quotes that stall at the same point. Some deals would have closed anyway, and the underlying conversion problem would have been diluted, not solved.
• An outside design agency, per project. Works for one showpiece bid. It does not work when every large order needs a mockup, because the cost per deal stays high and the turnaround is somebody else's queue. Sales cannot promise a buyer a visual by Thursday if the visual is subcontracted.
• Local in-house designers. The right shape of answer, and the slowest and most expensive way to get it. 3D designers who produce presentation-quality architectural visualisation are a specialist pool, and a doors-and-windows manufacturer is not the employer they are looking for.
• Two dedicated 3D designers from Latin America, full time, inside the sales process. Same shape as the in-house answer, filled in five days rather than months, on a flat monthly seat rate, working alongside the SDRs whose pipeline they unblock. This is what we did.

The sequencing is the part we would repeat anywhere. Designers first, because until the large orders could be shown, more pipeline was more waste. Then SDRs to generate the orders. Then a customer service seat so the people selling were not also the people answering the inbox.

How the fill went

Five people, three role types, two talent markets, all working within five days of the engagement. That is the number we would point to for speed at multi-role volume, rather than on a single easy requisition. We measure it to the first day of work, and all five started together.

What happened next

Unikat Home engaged us around March 2026. Six months later they are still a client, and we are in discussion about a further four hires as part of their growth plan.

We do not yet have a client-supplied figure on large orders closed or conversion since March, and we will add one here when we do rather than imply it now. The second expansion conversation, six months in, is the outcome we can stand behind today.

What this case shows

• The hire is usually not the obvious one. A manufacturer asked for help growing sales. The answer was two designers. That is the clearest illustration we have of diagnosis over order-taking.
• Range beyond the assistant lane. 3D designers with presentation-quality output are a long way from the executive-assistant work most offshore staffing companies live in. We filled them in the same five days as the SDRs.
• Sequence matters. Designers first, then pipeline, then service. Each seat made the next one worth having.
• Two markets, one brief. Latin America for design, Kosovo for sales and service, chosen per role.

Questions about this case