Sales effectiveness in specialty chemicals

Supported a specialty chemicals manufacturer in optimising their sales operations to deliver ambitious growth. ​

Our work, across an international group of hitherto highly autonomous sales operations, step-changed commercial excellence globally, including new customer segmentation and targeting methodology, consistent ways of working, reorganised teams, and sharpened KPIs. ​

Context

Our client, an entrepreneurial international manufacturer of specialty chemicals, was targeting ambitious growth. And a key lever to this was a significant upgrade to their lead-to-cash processes, with a clear focus on sales.

We were to manage a broad commercial excellence programme across three regions of the globe, to identify and capture end-to-end improvement opportunities in commercial processes.

Approach

Working closely with the Board, regional leaders and their sales teams across the globe, we took a three-phased approach: we assessed the starting point, designed the aspired “to be” and determined the roadmap, also initiating quick wins. 

Harnessing the highly autonomous local teams to co-create global, consistent solutions, we developed a far-reaching and practical plan to significantly upgrade and unify sales capabilities, approaches and supporting systems. 

Impact

The client implemented our roadmap, rolling out a new customer segmentation and targeting methodology to truly focus on the highest value customers and prospects, a new and more uniform organisational set up and way of working, an updated and sharpened set of KPIs, and a new CRM system whose procurement we had launched.