Manage Your Sales Team with Joe Kulak and Bill Baver

When it comes to improving sales performance, sometimes even a consultant needs a management consultant.

“ABC HR” is a global leader in human resources consulting, with more than 15,000 employees deployed in over 180 cities and 41 countries and territories worldwide. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of one of the largest insurance brokers in the world and has grown through the acquisition of some 40 large and small HR consulting firms since the mid-1970s.

ABC’s services center around the effective use of human capital. ABC builds and conducts employee surveys, develops and implements HR programs, and provides leadership in organizational change efforts. The company provides investment consulting services for employee pension plans, including decision making, risk management, and investment monitoring. Finally, ABC helps its clients work through strategic business transformations, including mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, IPOs, spin-offs, and divestitures.

Prior to contacting BearingPoint, a firm that provides consulting services to government agencies, large enterprises, and medium-size businesses, ABC’s sales teams suffered from three primary challenges:

1. Product complexity. ABC had grown through a regular series of acquisitions, each providing a range of services, some of which were new to the company and some of which overlapped with other services. While this resulted in a wealth of services to sell, it wasn’t always easy for the sales teams to match up a customer need with an available service. Opportunities were falling by the wayside, simply because the sales teams weren’t sure how to develop them.
2. Multiple sales processes. ABC was structured into distinct “practices,” each of which had its own unique sales process. This made it difficult for anybody outside that service to understand exactly what was going on with a particular opportunity inside a given account. This confusion and lack of communication created additional sales overhead and made it more likely that sales efforts would trip over one another.
3. Internal Competition. Because each practice functioned as a more-or-less separate business, each was to a certain extent in competition with all the other practices for the customer’s budget. To reduce the conflict between groups, ABC had already instituted a “client manager” structure so that each large customer would have a single point of contact to manage all the engagements that took place within that customer’s company. However, the client manager position required such a wide range of expertise and high level of business acumen that it was difficult to find qualified personnel to fill these roles.

This is not to say that ABC wasn’t successful. On the contrary, ABC possessed such a high level of specialized expertise that it was never difficult to find customers willing to pay for ABC’s services.

Still, there was a general feeling among ABC’s top management that they were leaving money on the table and not providing each customer with access to ABC’s full range of services.

Given its core competence in HR consulting, you’d think that ABC would know exactly how to make its sales force more effective. However, ABC knew it needed an objective perspective from a management consulting firm with extensive experience in sales transformation and sales technology.

Enter Bearing Point. After interviewing numerous personnel inside ABC, BearingPoint’s consultants proposed a two-step approach:

First, BearingPoint would help ABC create a common sales process throughout the entire corporation. Such a process would make it clear to everyone involved in sales what was happening inside any account. This, in turn, would reduce “stovepipe” behavior and allow the different practices to cooperate more effectively to develop each customer account. Because this sales process would be simple and straightforward, top management would be better able to make intelligent decisions about whether or not to go forward with an opportunity. Better decision making, combined with a more easily understandable sales process, would in turn improve the company’s overall ability to forecast future revenue.

Second, BearingPoint would help ABC set up a better technological mechanism for sharing information. Even with a common sales process, everyone in a customer-facing role needed access to the latest information about the accounts held in common. Specifically, sales professionals needed the ability to:

• Learn about the different practices
• Understand what worked when selling services inside those accounts
• Locate ABC employees with the specialized expertise required to develop an opportunity.

BearingPoint therefore proposed piloting, installing, customizing, and deploying an exten-sive CRM capability so that the 3,000- plus individuals involved in sales activities would be able to easily and conveniently share information about current and past opportunities and engagements. This CRM capability would then be rolled out to the entire company so that all employees could contribute, when possible, to key sales activities by, for example, adding contact information that might help ABC locate decision makers inside prospective customers’ firms.