Context

As a result of marketplace changes and multiple organization restructurings, the sales leaders within this ~$2B Global Software company’s Professional Services organization found it increasingly difficult to identify and create relevant proposals for their customers. There was a clear need for a revitalized and consistent offering portfolio, the challenge was how to get started and align interests across 3 regional operating structures (Americas, EMEA, APAC).

Approach

Establish a Common Vision

• Formed a leadership team of stakeholders from each region to define a common charter and identified 2 SMEs (1 primary, 1 backup) from each region to participate as part of the core team and represent their respective regions’ interests
• Key to alignment was identifying an executive sponsor who would formally sign off on the charter, which included specific measures of success agreed to by region leaders

Design for the Future

• Executed a formal, iterative analysis & design process to identify future state requirements and define a corresponding framework for the new portfolio
• Key to the framework was allowing for regional differences while maintaining a common set of core services and offerings
• Inventoried and mapped regional views to common hierarchical equivalents based on the target framework

Plan & Manage the Transition

• Stakeholders agreed that a single deployment of the new portfolio was not practical
• Agreed to and deployed a roadmap that defines logical groups of services and offerings to be deployed over a series of phases, including the key dependencies actively managed by a single program manager
• To maintain executive interest and support, established a standard governance program that covered the progress reporting needs of each stakeholder group and ensured prompt resolution of proposed roadmap changes

Ensure Field Readiness

• Included Deployment planning early in the design phase
• Applied significant effort to identify the proper target audiences for enablement and mapped each group to their applicable awareness & training programs
• Due to importance of a coordinated deployment, incorporated, executed, and managed the Enablement plan as part of the roadmap dependencies and deliverables

 Outcome

As predicted, this initiative reduced the number of proposals created and, at the same time, increased the # of proposals accepted & closed, leading to a nearly 4x improvement in the effective close rate (from a low point measurement of 11% to a high point of 40% of qualified opportunities closed).

As part of this initiative, the continuous deployment process, in conjunction with the new portfolio framework, enabled the offer development teams to deliver new and updated services at a much higher rate, e.g., 25% to 45% improvement in days-to-deliver depending on the offer category.