The Case Study:
The Challenge
Our client is a fast growing company that provides a variety of outsourced customer management solutions, customized telephone support services, order fulfillment, and marketing services for some of the most demanding Fortune 500 firms worldwide. After making a number of acquisitions, they were challenged with consolidating all of the businesses together into one company, getting the organizations to speak the same language, and moving to a more customer-centric approach to “think like a customer.” At the same time, management needed to keep their focus on growing the business and improving their operational effectiveness.
The company had multiple sales and account management organizations in both North America and Europe. They were faced with the added challenge of each organization using their own sales methodologies and processes established from disparate behaviors brought over from other companies. This not only impacted how they communicated internally with each other, but how they were perceived as a united sales teams in front of the customer. To put their situation into perspective, our client had multiple customer management systems and a number of different sales cultures all trying to move in one direction. This is not terribly unusual for a fast growing company building both from within and through acquisition.
To be best-in-class throughout their organization, our client wanted to be more effective in how they approached the customer – from the first engagement to the close of sale – and to close more sales. A consistent solution needed to be deployed worldwide in order for the sales teams to speak the same language. The entire organization – from the executive to operations level – needed a consistent methodology to approach customers and new processes and skill sets to communicate internally.
The Solution
We developed and implemented a fully integrated program designed to align the sales organizations into a more value-based, customer-centric go-to-market strategy. The core of the program was the Opportunity and Account Management skills and processes. The program helped deliver the skills sets and processes needed to prioritize top accounts, communicate and deploy consistent sales strategies, and align the right marketing messages with the right sales strategies and speak the same language in front of the customer.
The Results
The training was just recently implemented. Our client is already starting to see positive effects from the training. Their goal is to improve their close rate by 33% over the next 3 years.