Baria Planning Solutions, Inc - Fixing The Sales Process
Baria Planning Solutions, Inc - Fixing The Sales Process
STEVEN C. WHEELWRIGHT
WILLIAM SCHMIDT
Christy Connor looked up from her computer and gave a weary sigh. As the recently hired
director of North America Sales Support for Baria Planning Solutions (BPS), a consulting firm serving
manufacturers, Connor knew that she would be very busy trying to improve the disappointing
performance of her team. The Sales Support group’s difficulties were having a direct negative impact
on the performance of the entire company. The importance of her mission was highlighted by the
constant stream of calls, meetings, and emails that she had been fielding since she joined the
company last month. The urgency and critical nature of the problem was summarized by a recent
email from her boss, Brandon Ali, the President of North American Sales:
I have again looked at the win-loss report for 2010 and I am very concerned. Of the 271 qualified new
sales opportunities that arose in calendar year 2010, our win rate is now projected to be a dismal 15.5%.
We had originally forecast a win rate of 17.5%. Since our customers typically sign 3-year contracts, we
will be struggling for the next couple of years because we’ve missed our forecast sales productivity
target. Even more worrisome is the drop in our renewal rates. We had consistently achieved a renewal
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
HBS Professor Steven C. Wheelwright and writer William Schmidt prepared this case solely as a basis for class discussion and not as an
endorsement, a source of primary data, or an illustration of effective or ineffective management. This case, though based on real events, is
fictionalized, and any resemblance to actual persons or entities is coincidental. There are occasional references to actual companies in the
narration.
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4568 | Baria Planning Solutions, Inc.: Fixing the Sales Process
rate of around 91% to 92% over the last few years, but in 2010 it is 84%.
The Sales group directors are complaining that salespeople don’t get the timely assistance that they
need from the Sales Support group. While your team is partly organized along the same industry
divisions as the Sales group, some of the directors are suggesting that your entire team be organized
into industry-specific divisions in order to provide sharply focused and fully dedicated support to each
Sales division. I know your people work hard, but we have apparently missed proposal deadlines for
several opportunities, and each time it undermined the customer’s impression of us.
I realize that you have inherited a bit of a mess, but it is critical that you get your arms around this
situation and resolve it quickly. We appear to be digging ourselves deeper into a hole with every
passing week. Please have a proposal to me by next week with recommendations on how we can turn
this situation around. As part of this effort, I want you to quantify the staffing, utilization and costs
from your proposal based on the sales support requests for 2010 and compare it to our actual staffing
and utilization in 2010.
When Connor was in business school, she had learned about analyzing service operations
processes using production management techniques. Believing she could apply those techniques to
the challenges at hand, she decided to investigate the scheduling and work processes for her team.
Spend analysis was once the near-exclusive domain of smaller, specialty solution providers like
BPS. During the past several years, however, several large software and consulting firms, including
SAP and Accenture, have entered the market, leading to consolidation among smaller firms. BPS,
which originally served the U.S. energy sector exclusively, had survived by expanding its industry
coverage and capabilities through the acquisition of other narrowly focused industry-niche
providers. In 2007 BPS acquired a firm that primarily served the government sector, including
federal and state agencies and some large municipalities and nonprofit organizations. In 2008 BPS
acquired two more firms, one serving a range of manufacturing companies and another that
primarily served the retail sector.
While BPS initially allowed the acquired firms to continue operating semi-autonomously, the
company had since worked hard to integrate parts of each operation where synergies could be
achieved. The amount of effort required had not been trivial. While all four firms provided solutions
that addressed the same types of customer needs, the similarities ended there. In addition to serving
different industries, the firms had entirely different technology platforms, service delivery processes,
and even different fiscal year end-dates. Most of the pressing integration work was complete by the
end of 2009, although some technology migration projects were still in the works. By 2010, BPS
commanded a respectable 18% share of the market, but in a highly competitive market BPS could not
afford to lose any momentum in sales growth.
Recent Performance
The company’s performance in 2010 was extremely disappointing in both new client attainment
and existing client renewals. Exhibit 1 identifies the original and latest forecast for the sales
opportunities that were qualified in 2010. BPS categorized all sales opportunities into one of four
types:
New Sale: a new opportunity with a company that is currently not under contract with BPS.
Renewal: a renewal of a contract with an existing customer. The terms of the contract can be
materially different from the original contract, but there is often a significant amount of overlapping
scope between the two contracts.
Expansion: an expansion of the services delivered to an existing customer even though the
customer’s current contract is not near its renewal date.
Pilot: a special type of New Sale in which a company engages BPS in a short-duration pilot in
order to get more exposure to the BPS solution in the context of an actual project. Pilots often enter
the New Sales pipeline at the completion of the pilot project.
The most recent update to the sales forecast in Exhibit 1 was mid-February, 2011. By this time BPS
knew with certainty the outcome of all of the Renewal opportunities from 2010 and could make a
very good forecast of the outcome of the New Sale, Expansion, and Pilot opportunities. The total
number of opportunities in 2010 was higher than originally estimated, but the win rate was now
projected to be much lower than anticipated in most opportunity categories. Although the Sales
Support group was not entirely to blame for the lower win rates, it was widely recognized that the
team had difficulties meeting proposal deadlines and this had prevented BPS from putting its best
foot forward in several selling situations.
The North American Sales organization was structured into three groups—Sales, Sales
Operations, and Sales Support (see Exhibit 2). The Sales group, led by Chuck Dee, had four units
organized by the four major industry sectors that BPS served:
Government, including all federal, state, and local government agencies, as well as a handful of
large nonprofit organizations.
Retail and Other. While this sales division consisted mostly of large retail and wholesale
operations, it was also used as a catch-all for any sales opportunity that BPS pursued which did not
fit neatly into the other sales divisions
The industry alignment of the Sales group was a legacy of BPS’s acquisition strategy, but the sales
leadership believed that it was extremely useful to maintain this industry orientation.
The Sales Operations group, led by Jane Albright, was responsible for competitive intelligence,
win-loss analysis, sales training, staffing, and managing the sales force compensation plan. While this
group was not directly involved in any sales opportunities, it served a pivotal role in building the
infrastructure for a successful sales force. Albright and Dee were sometimes at odds over how the
sales force should be structured. Dee felt that all of the teams in the Sales Support group should be
aligned by industry sector, effectively providing fully dedicated support for the Sales group. Albright
believed that such a structure would require a large increase in staff. She and the former director of
Sales Support—Christy Connor’s predecessor—had successfully lobbied for the current hybrid
organization of the Sales Support group.
After BPS completed its string of the acquisitions the firm was under tremendous
pressure to get costs under control. Of course the market downturn that began in 2008
added another level of urgency to the situation. We felt that it was imperative, however,
to maintain our industry-centric, consultative sales process. The only way we could
hope to legitimately achieve this was to keep critical elements of our sales organization
organized by industry so they would continuously be immersed in industry issues.
After looking hard at the sales support function we decided that we could streamline the
team and maintain an industry focus with the hybrid model that exists today. Data
Engineering, Data Analysis, and Pricing do not require any meaningful industry-specific
expertise, but there are some real benefits to having Proposal Support staffed with
experts in the customer’s industry. There may still be issues that need to be ironed out,
but I remain convinced that the hybrid structure is critical for us to effectively balance
staffing constraints against the requirements for industry expertise.
Exhibit 3 provides a diagram of the process flow for the Sales Support group. The four teams in
the group have the following responsibilities:
Data Engineering: collect data from prospects, transform data into a standard format, examine
data for consistency and quality, and resolve any data irregularities.
Data Analysis: process data through BPS spend analysis software and identify opportunities for
cost reductions and supplier performance improvement.
Pricing: develop a pricing proposal in accordance with sales strategy, including options for risk-
sharing pricing, which tied the payments that BPS received from the customer to the results BPS
delivered to the customer.
This type of hybrid team structure did appear to be unique in the market. Most companies
roughly the same size as BPS in the spend-analysis space had organized their sales support teams
entirely by geography. Having an industry focus allowed BPS to distinguish itself from other mid-
sized competitors through a deeper understanding of industry-centric issues, and put the firm at
parity with small single-industry and large diversified competitors.
Dee took a different view on the situation. He felt that a hybrid structure didn’t go far enough and
was adamant that his team was losing opportunities because the Sales Support team wasn’t able to
meet its deadlines. He made his position clear when Connor met with him, saying “Since some of the
Sales Support teams are shared across sales divisions they don’t feel the urgency or the ownership
that is necessary to push proposals across the goal line.”
The solution-selling process required the Sales Support team to devote substantial upfront effort
to develop a proposal. Team members tracked the time they spent on each sales opportunity.
Exhibit 4 provides a summary of the time required for each Sales Support function across the
different types of opportunities. Regardless of the large workload associated with the process,
everything had to be completed in a timely fashion. Customers and prospects were unwilling to
significantly delay their solution selection choice due to the vagaries in the selling process of a single
vendor. The competition in the market was stiff and vendors had to be responsive with a high quality
proposal or risk early elimination.
Feedback on the process from BPS customers and prospects varied widely. While some companies
greatly appreciated the in-depth analysis and the greater confidence that it engendered in the BPS
solution, others complained that BPS “didn’t have their ducks in a row” by the time of the sales
presentation. In some cases, the BPS sales team has had to delay the presentation by days or even
weeks. Dee shared a recent experience with Connor:
I was on a call just last month with one of my salespeople trying to convince a
prospect to give us more time on a proposal review session. The prospect was polite but
made it clear that they were on a strict schedule and we had to either present on time or
drop out of the running. He was willing to give us a day or two, but we needed two
more weeks. Unfortunately the Sales Support team just couldn’t pull all the moving
parts together in time. We presented what we had, but it was not well received. This
was not a last minute project either…we had a full four weeks of advance notice.
Members of the Sales Support group were all too aware of the criticisms that had been leveled
against them. While they believed that the solution selling process could be quite effective in helping
the company win sales opportunities, they also believed that the expectations placed upon the team
could be unrealistic. Connor had one-on-one discussions with each member of her team in order to
better understand the pressures that they faced. As one team member put it:
Our workload is crazy. Some weeks I have a reasonable amount of assignments and I
can readily meet all of my obligations. In other weeks I have such a backlog of requests
that I find myself working late every night and over the weekend. I love the fast pace,
but when it gets really busy I am forced to explain that the sales deadlines won’t be met
without cutting corners on the analysis…and sometimes not even then! My husband has
given up trying to schedule family activities during those times and takes to referring to
me as his “shadow” wife.
Other team members echoed these comments and blamed the group’s difficulties on issues over
which they felt they had little control, including lack of visibility into the sales pipeline, being
brought in late on contract renewals, and sales support requirements that varied widely from one
sales opportunity to the next.
Renewals were based on the expiration date of the customer’s current contract. The Sales Support
team typically entered the planning process for a renewal about 5 weeks prior to the renewal date,
and the renewal presentation with the customer was usually scheduled to take place 2 to 3 weeks
after that; this left the team 2 to 3 weeks to conduct the analysis for the renewal. By conducting the
analysis as close to the renewal date as possible the team could utilize the very latest information
on the current engagement with the customer. The four steps in the sales support process for
renewals had average times to completion of 8 hours, 12 hours, 22 hours, and 4 hours respectively
(see Exhibit 4), which seemingly could be completed in ample time before the customer presentation.
Initially Connor suspected that her team may simply be under-staffed, but she set aside this
suspicion as she dug into data on the frequency and composition of the support requests that the
team received in 2010. To gauge staff utilization in roles that had variable effort levels (exactly the
situation that the Sales Support group faced) the company used a rule of thumb: if a function utilized
less than 70% of its capacity, it was considered at “low” risk of being caught short of staff due to the
variable nature of the work. Utilized capacity between 70% and 85% represented “medium” risk, and
between 85% and 100% “high” risk. When utilized capacity exceeded 100% the function was
obviously already “over” capacity. Connor summarized the number of requests that her group
received by industry sector in each quarter of 2010 (see Exhibit 5) and created annual summaries of
the requests for 2009 and 2010 (see Exhibit 6). As a first draft of the analysis Ali had requested,
Connor used this data and the information on mean process times to create a rough estimate of her
group’s annual staff utilization levels (see Exhibit 7). She compared these utilization levels to the
company rule of thumb and it appeared at first blush that her team wasn’t being stretched too far.
Connor considered cross-training her staff so people could pitch in wherever the workload was
the greatest. After looking at the annual utilization levels she had pulled together, it wasn’t clear,
however, that cross-training would provide much benefit. She asked Albright about this, but the
response was deflating:
We explored cross-training in the past and it was a bit of a disaster for two reasons.
First, the skill sets across the four functions on your team are very different, which
makes most types of cross-training ineffective and cost-prohibitive, with a couple of
exceptions. We found that Data Engineers could be cross-trained as Data Analysts, and
vice versa, at a per-person cost of approximately one month of salary and benefits, but
neither type of resource could become proficient at proposal support or pricing. The
Proposal Support team members could be cross-trained to support multiple industries at
a per-person cost of approximately three weeks of salary and benefits, but Chuck has a
very low tolerance for that idea—he feels it’s moving us further away from his desired
organization structure. As for the Pricing team members…well, let’s just say it is best to
leave them focused on pricing issues.
Second, the cross-trained team members were most effective when they stayed in
each role for at least three months. When we shifted people into roles for shorter time
periods, their productivity went way down.
Next Steps
Connor reviewed her notes. There were a number of actions that BPS could try. Should she hire
more resources? Abandon the industry-focused sales support team structure? Reorganize to a fully
industry-centric organization as Dee requested? Attempt to streamline the solution-selling process?
Give up on solution-selling altogether? Try novel cross-training tactics? Or was there a more effective
way to improve the team’s performance? The challenge was determining what course of action
would actually work. Connor considered the irony of asking Ali to extend the due date for getting
him a proposed solution. She knew he wouldn’t agree—which made her empathize even more with
the people on her team.
Exhibit 1 Forecast New Revenue from 2010 Opportunities, Excludes Contracts Not Up for Renewal
Average
Annual Duration Total Contract
Opportunities Win Rate Revenue (years) Revenue ($)
Original Forecast for 2010a
New Sale 250 17.5% $250,000 3 $ 32,812,500
Renewal 117 90.0% $250,000 3 $ 78,975,000
Expansion 60 90.0% $ 75,000 3 $ 12,150,000
Pilot 80 25.0% $ 50,000 1 $ 1,000,000
Total 507 $ 124,937,500
Latest Forecast for 2010b
New Sale 271 15.5% $225,000 3 $ 28,353,375
Renewal 117 83.8% $250,000 3 $ 73,534,500
Expansion 53 90.0% $ 70,000 3 $ 10,017,000
Pilot 103 22.0% $ 50,000 1 $ 1,133,000
544 $ 113,037,875
Total
2010
1st 2nd 3rd 4th Annual Quarter
Quarter Quarter Quarter Quarter Total Average
New Sale
Energy Sector 19 17 16 20 72 18.00
Government Sector 8 18 20 8 54 13.50
Manufacturing Sector 22 27 23 34 106 26.50
Retail and Other Sectors 12 10 7 10 39 9.75
Total 61 72 66 72 271 67.75
Renewal
Energy Sector 9 10 5 4 28 7.00
Government Sector 2 5 14 3 24 6.00
Manufacturing Sector 5 5 11 27 48 12.00
Retail and Other Sectors 11 4 2 0 17 4.25
Total 27 24 32 34 117 29.25
Expansion
Energy Sector 2 4 4 3 13 3.25
Government Sector 1 2 5 3 11 2.75
Manufacturing Sector 4 4 3 10 21 5.25
Retail and Other Sectors 4 2 2 0 8 2.00
Total 11 12 14 16 53 13.25
Pilot
Energy Sector 5 6 6 5 22 5.50
Government Sector 4 4 3 4 15 3.75
Manufacturing Sector 7 9 8 12 36 9.00
Retail and Other Sectors 12 7 5 6 30 7.50
Total 28 26 22 27 103 25.75
Total Requests
Energy Sector 35 37 31 32 135 33.75
Government Sector 15 29 42 18 104 26.00
Manufacturing Sector 38 45 45 83 211 52.75
Retail and Other Sectors 39 23 16 16 94 23.50
Total 127 134 134 149 544 136.00
Renewals Won
Energy Sector 8 10 4 4 26
Government Sector 2 4 11 3 20
Manufacturing Sector 4 5 10 20 39
Retail and Other Sectors 8 3 2 0 13
Total 22 22 27 27 98
Mean Fully-
Process Loaded Available Utilization
Workload Time Resources Cost Work Rule of
(requests) (hours) (headcount) ($/year) Hoursa Utilization Thumb