ABOUT ADAPTIVE.

COMPETENCY BASED CASE STUDIES

---

COMPETENCY – Organisational Design – Strategic Thinking

What Is Wrong With This Picture?

Client – A Large Technology Services Company

Team – lead by Managing Consultant Ingrid Blades

---

Against a background of increasing concerns about the sales pipeline and lack of new business wins, ImageChoice undertook an organisational audit review of the UK sales and marketing function and delivered a SWOT analysis. At the time of completing the SWOT the sales teams had not had a sale in over two years.  Board members reviewed the information and many behind closed doors discussions took place about how to fix the problems. Mostly the suggested strategies were ones that had been tried before, none were transformational or motivational. There was an awareness that something needed to be done but limited enthusiasm from board members to change what they as a leadership team were actually very comfortable with. After all, the existing professional sales and marketing structures had served the company well in the past. Indeed the company had an impressive record of past big sales wins and many of these existing accounts were still producing some new business. The executive team reasoned that the problem existed because there was less business available in the market place. They believed that the market would eventually pick up and everything would come right again. Meanwhile the company just needed to cut its cloth [yes perhaps another redundancy situation] and survive to fight another day.

---

The Strategy

ImageChoice suggested that before making the final decision about another “right-sizing” programme, it would be prudent to engage other business leaders in early discussions so as to get buy-in for the strategic plan. The executive team give permission for a series of workshops to be held over a three week period that would include a mix of people from across different business units and functions. It was the first time that a strategic plan would be drawn up using collaborative teams from across the matrix structure of the company. Over a three week period ImageChoice facilitated several workshops and a draft strategic plan addressing issues in the SWOT analysis was delivered to the executive board.  The plan detailed a major reorganisation of the sales and marketing functions.  The suggestion was to keep some of the existing expertise focused on winning the big deals that the company traditionally focused on. In addition the strategy would be to build a new team focused on winning deals within the SME market place, a business sector the company had never targeted before. The simple premise was that winning smaller but reasonable margin deals would create cash flow. This would help offset the high costs of sales associated with winning the big deals that often took 2 or more years to bring to fruition. Meanwhile the very professional account management teams would continue their excellent work in generating business from existing customers.

---

Outcome

So going against the expectations of a down sizing exercise a re-organisation project was launched which actually included a recruitment campaign. A board level executive director for sales and marketing was recruited. ImageChoice’s Ingrid Blades was asked to take up the reigns as the HR Director for the new business unit and she worked with the teams over a 12 month period. Within the first 6 months the business had exceeded its annual sales targets by 20%. The benefit to the business of this work was an organisational design better suited to its market place.

---