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Parkingeye knew three people could sell. They needed to know if the other seventeen could learn.
415
Contracts closed in 2025, against a 380 target
About
Parkingeye is one of the UK's largest parking management companies. It sells parking enforcement and management to landowners, retailers, hospitals and commercial sites, and installs and runs the systems on site. Its sales team works in the field, across the country, five days a week.
Headquarters
Chorley, Lancashire, UK
Industry
Facilities Services
Employees
201-500 employees
THE CHALLENGE
The same three people hit budget. Every month.
A Parkingeye rep spends the week in a car. They meet a landowner in a retail park, walk the site, count the spaces, and work out whether the deal is even legally possible — who holds the lease, who the tenants are, whether signage needs freeholder approval. Nobody watches them do it. There is no ride-along. There is no recording. Whatever happens in that conversation is only ever reported back second-hand.
By 2025 the team was hitting its numbers. That was not the problem.
The problem was who was hitting them. Month after month, the same handful of reps carried the target while the rest of the team came in at a fraction of it. Sales Director Rob Lambert described the standing conversation with his CEO: “It's not, well done, you've hit budget. It's, why have you hit budget? And it's been the same three people that have hit budget.”
And underneath the inconsistency was a number that made every month a coin toss. Parkingeye signs roughly one deal in ten opportunities. The top performers ran fifty conversations at a time and killed the dead ones fast. Everyone else arrived at month end holding two. “Our salespeople will have two opportunities to sign two deals, and if those two hit a speed bump, they miss their target,” Rob said. “And it's almost invariable because they don't have anywhere else to go. So they don't have plan B and they don't have plan C.”
Parkingeye had already tried to answer this. They interviewed their three most successful salespeople — Darren Harrington, Paul Cudworth and Gareth Bakewell, sixty-odd years of selling between them — and wrote down what good looked like: rapport built fast, questions before assertions, promises kept, and the discipline to walk away from a dead deal early. They had the definition. What they did not have was any way to tell whether a given rep was getting closer to it or further away.
The company had also priced up the conventional route: a classroom sales-methodology programme, six figures, reps only, managers extra. It would have taught the process. It would not have measured who could run it.
To find out whether consistency was a training problem or a hiring problem, Parkingeye turned to SecondBody.
“Can I see salesperson A going from here to here to here to here?” — Rob Lambert, Sales Director, Parkingeye
THE SOLUTION
Turning “is this rep any good” into a number with a gate on it
Darren Harrington ran it. He is a Parkingeye salesperson, not a trainer and not a manager — one of the three the company had interviewed to define what good looked like. He built the scenarios, the personas and the scoring, and he still carried a target while he did it.
The first year was practice. Reps ran conversations against AI personas drawn from Parkingeye's real buyers — the gatekeeper, the facilities manager, the trustee, the procurement lead — and got scored on them. Adoption came first, and it came quickly.
Then the CEO's question forced the second version. Practice on its own could not show progression, so the team chained the sales methodology into a sequence of stages a rep has to pass in order. Bonding and rapport, then the up-front contract, then the pain funnel, and on through the process. Score below the bar on a stage and you do not unlock the next one. For the first time the company could answer, per person, per stage, how far along someone actually was.
Day to day it is fifteen minutes. A rep opens a scenario, sees who they are about to talk to and what the situation is, and has the conversation. Once a month the whole team spends a week talking only to Rory, the AI coach.
“So they can't blag it,” Darren said of that week. The managers then read the results off a dashboard instead of asking reps how it went.
The whole point is habit, isn't it? 21 days to form a habit. If you're doing it every day for 15 minutes, you're going to get better at it.
Darren Harrington
Senior Commercial Leader, Parkingeye
Two things changed that were not on anyone's plan. Reps started re-running the same stage three and four times to clear the bar — which Darren counts as the point, not a failure. And this field team, the one with no desks, quietly rejected the mobile version. Phone signal in the field was poor and cars were noisy. They chose to sit down with a laptop somewhere quiet instead.
THE IMPACT
The gap stopped being a mystery and started being a list of names
By 2026 the programme covered every target-bearing role at Parkingeye, across three workspaces including EMEA. Completion on the most recent programme ran at roughly six in ten across the whole company, and around eight in ten once maternity and long-term absence were excluded.
Parkingeye did not have to run a formal trial to test whether it was working, because the company ran the comparison for them by accident. Adoption was uneven between divisions. Some teams used the platform daily. Others barely touched it. That left two groups inside one company, selling the same product into the same market in the same months.
On 1 May 2026, the division that used it most reported this: “We are 33% over target for the year to date already. We've done as many deals in two months as we did in eight months last year.”
Every rep on that team hit target that period — including the ones who never had before. Meanwhile the divisions that had not adopted it were behind. Darren's read, fifteen months in and with the newest starters outperforming people who had been there years: “It's black and white. There's no coincidence with that.”
The second change is the one the numbers do not show. Sales managers used to coach off a CRM dashboard, which told them how many meetings a rep had booked and nothing about how any of them went. They now open a transcript. The company's L&D director reports platform completion figures upward, and the Chief Revenue Officer asks about them.
415
Contracts closed in 2025 against a 380 target; 2026 set at 500
33%
Over year-to-date target by 1 May 2026, in top platform-usage division
SecondBody changed how we coach. Scorecards surface what matters instantly — no more hours listening to calls. We tightened objection handling, and even in a quiet month, meetings booked and conversion are way up.
Darren Harrington
Senior Commercial Leader, Parkingeye
The programme has run for eighteen months and Parkingeye consistently uses more than it buys. That is the clearest signal in the whole account: this is not a licence sitting idle.
The uncomfortable part is that the comparison cuts both ways. The teams that used it are ahead. The teams that did not are behind. Same product, same market, same months.
WHAT’S NEXT
From practising the process to coaching the pipeline
In summer 2026 Parkingeye switched methodology. Having run the original programme for a year, Darren rebuilt the boot camp around a question-led approach — situation, problem, implication, need-payoff — because it mapped better onto how his reps actually sell. Calls got longer. Reps got further into consequences instead of features. “Spin is much better,” Darren says. “It seems a lot more accurate for scoring.”
The next phase moves coaching onto live deals rather than practice ones — connecting the coach to the CRM so managers get asked about the three deals forecast to close this month with no activity in twelve days, instead of running another scenario.
What tells you the relationship holds is not the renewal. It is what happened around it: Parkingeye ran over its minute allocation and kept going, the L&D director started requesting monthly reports for the board, and a company that began with one narrow cohort of new business reps now has every target-bearing role on the platform.
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