Consulting

Improving Cross-sales and Customer Loyalty through Solution Selling

Creating a Culture of Consultative Sales with Process, Competence and Mindset Change

CHALLENGE: A global logistics service provider was facing a lack of coordination and collaboration between its product lines of sea, freight, air, warehousing and others. As some of these product lines were recently acquired, the legacy sales approach of product and silo thinking was still dominant. The head of sales brought in BSCC to drive the transformation towards solution sellingbecause of our experience in consultative sales and change management.

APPROACH: A first in-depth intake with different layers of managers showed pain points in systems, processes, renumeration models as well as a lack of proper selling skills and methodology needed for scalable growth and addressing more sophisticated demanding global customers.

We created multi-modality groups to build bridges between different departments to boost understanding, appreciation and product knowledge, and to find solutions to the process gaps.

A training program was customised to improve consultative selling skills,while making use of the strong story telling culture that was a part of the company’s DNA. This cultural alignment was a major factor in the adoption of the new approaches.

In addition to offering the customer a holistic solution, we also had to align with the customers’ sales and buying process to be with the right person, talking about what really matters to them - at the right moment. A methodology was introduced to have an in-depth analyses of business opportunities with the key players involved including status of buying process.

This methodology enabled sales executives and key-account managers to build a healthy sales-pipelinewith improved accurate predictability of outcome.

We are presently focussing on middle management to create a motivational coaching climate with clear tools and methods in order to get sustainable change in behavior that matches the company’s ambitions.

RESULTS: These changes have been rolled out across a sales force of over 80 people across Europe. As a result, our client has seen higher conversion ratesof leads and on average higher margins per salesfrom better value perception. .Additionally, our client has experienced improved customer loyaltydue to being seen as a knowledgeable, value-adding partner by their customers.

Driving Change in How Teams Make Decisionsn

Building high performing teams through a focused decision-making culture

CHALLENGE: An international industrial goods company wanted to improve the time for the market launch of their new product development. With a wide portfolio of hardware, software and services and cross-functional decentralized teams, the client wanted to bring more discipline to the team‘s decision-making process. BSCC was asked to present the decision method Consensus,which enables faster and better decision making by combining the focus on critical issues with an integrative process to leverage the unique strengths of the team.

DISCOVERY: We approached this project in three steps: understanding the current culture, defining the goals and target behaviors, and lead the necessary change management. While the core of our consulting methodology remains consistent, our implementation is fully customized to meet client needs.We observed several team interactions at management, functional and project team level to understand how decisions were currently made and where the critical points were. This helps us to identify which of the pillars of good decision making needs to be improved as a priority.

To define the future state and ensure that our methodology works within the structure of our client, we conduct live caseswith the project teams on their most urgent decisions. In one case, a team was able to use consensus to make a unanimous decision within 30 minuteson an issue that had been unresolved for almost a year. This is just one of many possible examples.

Bringing about cultural change is usually the most difficult part of any transformation, especially when many people are involved. BSCC shapes change in three dimensions: institutionalised knowledge base,early success storiesand train-the-trainer education.The methodology of the consensus was made available to the target group via e-learning. In developing this knowledge base for the customer we carried out consensusbuilding with as many teams as possible to build a repertoire of success stories. Finally, we conducted training for trainers, starting with the management levels, who continued to support the introduction of this method. The successes of consensus building are recorded systematically.

IMPACT: When teams integrate consensusinto their daily work, they are able to make better decisions in less time.The product development teams serve the customer as convincing examples of high-performance teamswith a focused decision-making culture.

Transformation of Procurement into Strategic Partners

The creation of a new structure, transparency and the development of competence in the procurement of a 1 billion Euro international construction manufacturer

CHALLENGE: A global manufacturer of building materials lacked structure and visibility in its procurement function, severely compromising its ability to set strategic KPIs, manage suppliers and analyze expenses. When a new COO came on board, he wanted to install the processes and procedures needed to turn procurement into a value-added partner - especially ahead of the upcoming SAP implementation. BSCC was chosen to lead this reorganization because of our holistic approach to procurement, our innovativeyet pragmatic methodsand our collaborative approachto building customer competence.

APPROACH: The first step was to attract the right talent to support the new procurement organisation. Together with the client, BSCC defined the selection criteria to hire two strategic purchasing agents who became our key contacts during the one-year commitment.

Together with the strategic purchasers we implemented several of BSCC‘s unique methods: the four value creation phases, procurement market group strategiesto unlock hidden potential in supplier management and material group indicesto quickly identify suppliers that needed to be renegotiated based on raw material prices.

In addition, we worked with functions from across the organization, particularly product development and sales, to establish a comprehensive purchasing policythat defined purchasing levels and requested for quotation guidelines that enabled transparency and compliance while accelerating processes.

In order to ensure the development of expertise, BSCC supported the strategic purchasers during the entire process of defining the internal structure. In addition, we offered extensive coaching on supplier management, including supplier evaluations and scorecards, negotiation planning and negotiation execution.

IMPACT: With the transparency created with our tools and analyzes, the customer was able to identify savings potential, set strategic goals and get all suppliers to disclose their costing within 6 months.As a result of our collaboration with the rest of the organization, procurement became an accepted partnerin the upstream area of product development to better achieve the product target costs.

The roles of strategic buyers have become talent development roles within the client‘s organisation and have led to the filling of several management level positions.

Sustainable Return to Profitability through Comprehensive Restructuring

Operational turnaround and procurement transformation reduced costs by 25% and increased production by 240% for transportation construction company

CHALLENGE: One business area of a transport construction company based in Germany has seen production costs rise and quality decline over the last five years. As the company was operating in a price competitive market with low profit margins, our customers‘ costs were higher than the market prices and therefore they could not win new orders.

In the past, several turnaround attemptswere made, but these failed due to a lack of root cause analysis and methodical/organizational adaptation to the customer. During this critical time, the company‘s CEO assigned BSCC to reduce the total costs by 20% - counting on their expertise in negotiations and decision making.

APPROACH: BSCC worked together with the client for four months and dealt with the two largest cost-producing areas, production personnel and procurement expenses, which accounted for more than 80% of the costs.

The client had more than 150 production staff and we performed a detailed material flow and value stream analysisto understand the end-to-end workflow. As a result, we identified one forming process as the biggest bottleneck. To eliminate this bottleneck, we designed a systematic knowledge transferbetween experienced and newer operators to enable additional shifts and reorganized the inbound logistics to reduce waiting times.

In addition, our assessment revealed a significant non-value-added activity in the product process which, if eliminated, could reduce the need for operators by 25%. Since much of the customer‘s production personnel was unionized, extensive negotiation and decision-making was required to ensure that personnel were retained on the basis of performancerather than seniority. BSCC led the discussion between our client, the works council and the union to agree on a final list.

The procurement function was led by a new CFO and we worked with him to develop a procurement strategy to set savings targets by material group. We then coached him in negotiations with suppliers using BSCC 4-P negotiation planning,which guides the client through planning, techniques and scenario analysis.

After the changes had been implemented, BSCC led a series of workshops with the business unit management to communicate the reasons for the measures and to address questions and concerns. This ensured that the remaining staff felt supported, secure and valued.

RESULTS: The changes in production and procurement have reduced the customer‘s costs by 25%,exceeding our original target of 20%. In addition, the customer had a 240% increase in productionin the months following implementation. The consulting process until the reorganizationtook only 4 months.