A Pre-Read
Many of you have heard different pieces of what follows, but hopefully, this pre-read will help to clarify what we're doing, why we're doing it and how we will make it happen.
The Business Context
Our business provides advice and solutions that significantly improve the cost and quality of our client's operations. This can include an almost infinite array of things - from redesigning logistics networks to creating programs for restaurant chains, IT, rental cars, packaging and pharmacy benefits services for employees.
Our goal is always to offer expert guidance and personalized services to help clients evaluate their costs of operation and achieve far greater efficiency.
Our operation is centred around private equity and building relationships with them. We work with our portfolio companies to involve them within our membership. They elect spend categories to find savings, and then we connect them with vendors to get implemented.
And it’s a constantly changing and dynamic world.
Some Of The Forces At Play
A Complex Landscape - It’s been a case of all hands on deck for a long time now, with everybody doing many things with often overlapping capabilities and roles. Every person in the sales team is doing everything. Some people are doing it while managing others. Some people are just doing it as part of the team. At any one time, anyone will work with (the) private equity firms, portfolio companies, and various opportunities and pass them off to vendors to get implemented. Rinsing and repeating. But it's increasingly inefficient.
Not Taking Full Advantage - A considerable amount of our work is not sales related. A lot of activity, but we are missing the real insight. We are not working as smartly as we could. We are doing too many things to achieve a transaction for simplicity but not always building the right value for the long term. Always onto the next thing means we don't know how things are implemented. We are missing so much because we don’t have a sophisticated enough system to work within or a modern system that works for us.
Deep In The Trenches - Our salespeople are distracted, and we are missing the bigger premiums we could have through increased performance. We are missing the opportunities for better interactions and improved customer experiences. Everyone knowing a little bit of everything is a good thing, but reorganizing ourselves so that there is greater clarity and focus will make for a rapid improvement in every respect.
Speed To Impact And Performance - We have a low win rate on qualified deals. It can take considerable time to realize revenue. We want to shorten that. Most of our growth comes from signing new members, organic expansion, and development/growth within the membership —and in the future, we will ‘sell’ existing members into new categories.
A High-Performance Culture - We want to introduce a performance-oriented culture to inspire, focus and incent people much better. In future, sales leaders will be coaching, guiding, accelerating and stewarding the sales cycle. Teams of people working together in roles that are ideally suited to them and give them the ability to be themselves and their best. Everyone benefits. It’s not about labels and hierarchy but responsibility and accountability for what’s important, what works and how we can best serve our audiences and stakeholders to achieve the desired outcomes.
What We Are Shooting
We are at a major moment of opportunity and inflexion. We aim to realize much more value. As a result, there are several important things we intend to do to improve the fundamentals of our business:
To preserve and expand our business into the future.
Extending and securing our position in the private equity space and growing our business by diversifying the revenue stream.
Adding considerable value beyond a slim set of contracts into a much broader relationship with our members.
A defensible position for the long term—sustainability and resilience
Category leadership with clear blue water between us and the rest of the industry.
Accelerating revenue realisation, accelerated savings and increased value realization, market share and growth supplier. Transform our go-to-market motion to unlock and accelerate growth.
Create the most efficient and coherent way of working to achieve focus for our people.
Increase performance overall to ensure improved win rates, more volume, and new members.
Protect and grow the private equity channel.
Move the GTV - gross transaction volume >60%
Sell more categories to existing members.
Withstand increased competitive pressure and build a sustainable future.
Embed resilience throughout the business and adopt a digital and data-driven approach where appropriate.
We must improve the clarity of our plan and direction and streamline everything to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
>GTV%
>New categories
>New members - new private equity relationships and increased penetration.
In Our Near Future
We are a data-driven enterprise—deploying the right technology to significantly improve performance and effectiveness and expanding our footprint within the procurement ecosystem.
An empowered/enabled sales team —supported by the most efficient sales and revenue machine.
Leveraging appropriate technology and data - designed to broaden our impact and value with existing and a substantially new set of contracts.
A focus on our portfolio of market offerings:
Protect, improve and grow the private equity channel right at our heart -
Continuing to provide and increase tremendous value to core clients.
Upweight the suite of other competitive programs.
Continue identifying and encouraging the talent and skills required to help us deliver our growth targets.
An aggressive path to success—We have a lot of organic growth, but we are on an aggressive path, and the clarity we are driving for will focus entirely on transforming the system to impact growth.
Coherence for our people—They are motivated and play their roles without barriers and artificial hierarchy. Meaningful definition and structure that enables collaboration and teamwork throughout the entire sales motion.
We are building a cutting-edge system that’s elegant and clearly defined. Where everyone knows their role. Where our people are supported and not stressed, they perform well. They're motivated to do it, and the outcome is a long-term and sustainable business that achieves and outperforms its goals—a world where we are trading on value and not just price.
Intelligent sales system designed to serve—Powerfully executing with the private equity firms we already know and a plan to target and identify those we want to work with. Empowered teams driving the right conversations, a great experience that onboards, implements and sustains.
Equipped to win—Real data visibility that leads to the insights that make a difference and the right tools for our journey. We are truly data-driven. We are specialists - working within a performance culture because revenue growth* and realization is the outcome we want.
*Gross transaction value can only happen through precision planning and disciplined systems designed to work that way. Everything we describe here has a role to play and must be optimized within the system as a whole.
The Detailed Blueprint For A Sustainable Future
To instil confidence and achieve success, we need a detailed plan with the right level of well-considered detail that allows for flexibility and inevitable course correction as we learn. The design of the sales machinery is a blueprint. It contains all the elements below.
We need room to go and execute this.
The blueprint will illustrate the right tools in the right place.
The blueprint will reconfigure everyone (roles/skills) to ensure we maximise our capabilities.
The blueprint will manage expectations and support people to leverage the new system.
The blueprint will be the architecture that explains what systems we need to change.
The blueprint will integrate the dashboards needed to monitor what’s important on a close to real-time basis.
The blueprint creates well-defined goals and roles and identifies where all processes and systems need to exist and what purpose and function they provide.
PLACEHOLDER - For Illustration Only
Design Principles For The Blueprint
We will manage our business in smaller real-time increments - tracking performance.
We will make intelligent adjustments that accelerate activity.
We will measure leading indicators to assess what’s working to anticipate results.
We will introduce dashboards to ensure everyone’s connected to this and show how somebody's doing against their target.
We will have analysis and comparisons that show where we are at any time and compared to last year.
The correct compensation, motivation and support. We must first change the expectations. Then change how we enable, change how we measure, and change how we reward.
Intelligent separation of roles - utilizing the genuine skills of the team.
Create the ‘member success team’.
Optimizing the team's time
Create a member segmentation system
Introduce propensity to buy capability
Ensure the whole team is working on the right opportunities at the right time - all the time.
The Alpha Team - Streamline the sales process.
The Skateboard Project - enabling technology and techniques that will reduce friction in the sales process.
Reduce the length of the sales process through smart thinking and redesign
More proactivity (catch and receive rather than go out and pitch)
More guiding and coaching to empower the teams
Blueprint - A Focus On New Skills Required
Excellence and deep capability in exploiting data.
Activating the skills of the people we already have.
Critical and strategic thinkers - creating meaningful plans and execution
Mindset change and encouraging people (CEs) to become more empowered and proactive
Investing in significant motivation, encouragement and support - training and coaching
Blueprint - A Performance Culture.
Being deliberate about the design of the ‘machine’ will revolutionize how we sell, transforming how we grow and increasing revenues.
This mechanism gives us the plan and the focus for everything we need to do. This is proven and essential for creating a motivated performance culture. Everyone has a sense of direction, can navigate the system, and know their role - and with the correct tools in place, they can prioritize their tasks. The blueprint provides them with their plan and a palpable sense of purpose and ownership.
We will set the correct expectations. We will dramatically improve how we enable and measure and change how we reward.
All of this is designed to encourage growth in productivity and creativity in how we think and work.
We will define the role we need
We will hire the people.
We will segment the assigned accounts.
We will create a member success team.
Blueprint - Transformation And Expectation Setting
We're aiming to get 60% more production out of our team. We have great foundations to build on, and now we are redoubling the effort and focus based on a meaningful and precise transformational plan. Many things need to change to do it, but we have a competent team, and we will do it.
A big part of any successful plan requires us to manage expectations properly. We need our people with us every step of the way. We will manage the idea of significant target increases alongside how we will enable, measure and reward everyone accordingly. All these things are highly interdependent and important for us to manage properly in a very compressed timeline.
From $50 million a year, to $80 million is a mindset and approach change of significance. Thinking differently and operating differently in a short period of time requires us all to be aligned and armed. We need the plan/blueprint, support, tools, and dedicated expertise to make this happen.