The Situation

Vendors of all sizes, private or public, will suffer impacts to margins and profitability despite accelerating revenue growth. Why does this happen and what do you do about it?

Towards the second half of the 2010s, Infrastructure Corp.*, a public-listed IT infrastructure company that launched an industry-changing innovation was experiencing significant growth in the size of the deals in which they engaged and the revenue they were earning. Despite this,

Arguably, Infrastructure Corp. was still holding onto its first-mover advantage and a superior solution. Its sales team consisted mainly of leading sales representatives recruited from competitors. The company was also competing in more deals than ever. However, sales leadership observed that they were losing more deals than they were winning (also known as a negative win/loss ratio).

What We Found

With the support of and in partnership with Infrastructure Corp.’s executive leadership, the company took the extraordinary step of employing one of Neuralytix’s team members to work full-time in-house to determine the cause of Infrastructure Corp.’s situation, recommend a strategy, and implement the recommended strategy.

The Neuralytix team drew from our comprehensive knowledge of Infrastructure Corp.’s market and our go-to-market experience and identified several key factors contributing to Infrastructure Corp.’s situation:

• Inconsistent, insufficient, distrust of competitive intelligence.
• Misaligned metrics for lead qualification.
• Inadequate oversight into the sales process.

These, and other factors, resulted in Infrastructure Corp.’s sales team unable to work at its full potential.

Our Recommendations

Based on our findings, we launched several structural changes to Infrastructure Corp.’s sales processes:

These initiatives included:

• Develop a competitive intelligence organization that could gather highly granular competitive information, in some cases, how an individual competitor’s sales representatives operate.
• Develop confidence and trust with all levels of the sales organization – in some cases participating in client meetings.
• Create regular educational knowledge exchange between the competitive intelligence and the lead generation teams to help improve the qualification of leads – significantly reducing the time the sales team spent on opportunities that yielded little to no revenue.
• Develop new operational practices in conjunction with the sales operations team to improve oversight into the sales process that would improve the probability of winning business.

The Results

With the acceptance and authorization of the recommended strategy by Infrastructure Corp.’s executives and the initiatives were implemented.

Within 18 months from the start of the engagement, Infrastructure Corp. measurably transformed it situation.

• It reversed its negative win/loss ratio to a historic high.
• The company broke through a significant revenue barrier.
• The deals where the sales team engages the competitive intelligence team in direct client engagements had a significantly higher success rate. 25% of the revenues of the company involved the competitive intelligence team’s participation
• The lead to deal conversion rate improved materially increasing the efficacy of the sales team.
• The new operational practices introduced into the sales process resulted in a shortened sales cycle.

* The confidentiality of our clients is paramount to us. While the name of the client as are some/all specific details related to the client’s engagement with Neuralytix, the results are real.