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Client: A $1.5 Billion Silicon Valley Technology Company.

Core Offerings: Transformation Services

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The situation before we started with the client.

A newly hired VP of Professional Services inherited a global organization and was challenged with growing a stagnant business unit that lacked standardized processes or tool-sets while operating in ad-hoc mode.

The business success requirements were comprised of implementing a predictable end to end sales model to drive the overall opportunity combined with transaction processes to include pre-sales, solution design, pricing, contracting and order fulfillment.

Incrementally, the desire for repeatable and measureable processes required implementation of standardized toolsets and data integration to gain visibility into end-to-end performance and spend required to measure success.

The "real issues."

The inability to provide sufficient sales support was creating a heavy lift for the sales force and was distracting the force from what they do best. Selling.

We kept hearing the sales field say "things take too long, the process is too painful and we're asking the customer/partner to do too much work."

As we began to engage, we quickly discovered there were three major areas of concern:

• People problems, power struggles and heavy politics existed across the organization.
  
  This resulted in unfocused and fragmented strategies strewn across the business units.
  
  We determined that without a unified vision, normalized alignment of interdependencies and open execution strategies to the organization, things would never get off the ground.
• Standardized end to end sales support processes and associated tools were non-existent.
  
  Every sales opportunity required individuals to re-invent the wheel while depending on non-standardized and decentralized documents and tools.
  
  These gaps resulted in unacceptable turn-around times, inconsistent sales offering quality and credibility damage with partners and end customers.
• Inadequate infrastructure was in place to measure and drive operational and financial improvement.
  
  This left an inability to measure performance changes, little visibility into spend and no clear way to report against leadership success requirements.

Our approach to solve the problem.

Step 1 - We worked with leadership to outline the desired results and formed a steering committee consisting of the core business functions required to support the transformation.

Then as an extension of the affected business units, we ensured all agendas, objectives and strategies were captured.

Next we helped the business to rationalize, integrate and build a socially accepted, open and interlocked transformation execution plan.

Step 2 - We explored ways of centralizing repeatable process and functions requiring stronger controls within a specialized business group.

Additionally, we sought rapid behavior change by providing centralized, standardized, tool-sets and templates to ensure predictable workflow and repeatable processes that would drive high-quality work output.

Step 3 - We looked at every individual job function involved in the process, clearly understood what their role was and determined how to reduce overlap by separating the roles and tasks associated with repeatable and non-repeatable activities.

Step 4 - We integrated some basic infrastructure which allowed the client to track, measure and report progress details on each opportunity and how it drove business as a whole.

Included in this solution was the ability to measure utilization of resources, trends in work effort, associated spend and win-rates, all in real time.

The client benefits.

Our client was able to open strategies to the organization, delegate business ownership rights and ensure full stakeholder buy-in at all levels to form a global execution framework that offered accountability and was highly adaptable to change.

"Fire fighting" tactics were minimized and focus was shifted toward strategic priorities.

Both short and long term goals were met while eliminating manual efforts and creating endless, self-feeding process improvement strategies.

This yielded rapid productivity gains and insured increased accountability through centralized tool-sets, advanced workflow and automated communication strategies.

Additionally, through implementing minor changes to their infrastructure we were able to help them realize:

• Strengthened problem review and issue resolution mechanisms to rapidly enable change.
• Conjoined operational metrics programs and process improvement cycles through intelligent performance reporting.
• Clairvoyant views into spend along with substantiated financial support required to back future change.
• Accurate and actionable strategic decision making requirements.

The net result.

We replaced their sales complexity with simplicity and eliminated the distractions that were inhibiting the sales force, partners and customers from transacting the sale.

Additionally, we drastically improved their sales support capabilities and reduced their overall cost.

We were able to help our client build an unshakeable sales engine with accuracy and velocity capabilities required to power an optimized end to end selling machine which ultimately allowed the company to "simply sell".

The key to success.

The ability to see past the day to day struggles joined with impartial collaboration, less talk, more action and implementing rapidly adaptable crisp, clear and easy to use sales support solutions.