An International construction company, faced with tightening market condition across the GCC decided to reduce operational overheads and headcount. They were concerned that their cost saving initiatives would negatively impact their brand image within the region.
Identified issues & symptoms
- Tightening economic conditions, project budgets cut, projects delayed
- small number of completed large scale projects limit their visibility to high end clients
- Decreasing bid win rate for new projects
- failure to secure invitations to tender for high profile projects
- Revenue targets at risk
- Cost pressure from both clients and corporate to do more with less
- Client facing managers neglecting to sell value add opportunities by remaining focused on project technicalities and costs
What we did
- Upskilled the client facing project teams to build a customer relationship mindset as well as demonstrating engineering expertise
- Introduced concept of customer power maps, as a tool in account management
- Expanded from technical project management to account and active opportunity management
- Provided insight on regional business norms for client facing managers
- Introduced value of networking to promote the broader company value proposition
- Established the protocols for customer facing team members to collect and share customer insights & business information across groups and departments
- Leverage creativity – with a focus on expertise and opportunity spotting – across teams, to create commercial benefits
Results
- The initiative was linked to a 12 month revenue target to demonstrate value of the investment.
- 12 month revenue goal was achieved within first 6 months of the program execution
- Overachieved the initiative revenue target by 50%
- Bid win rate increased by 15%
- New high value customer segments accessed leading to more requests for tender
- Invitations to advise on proposal development received – before tender released
- Overall, significant growth of revenues through new projects, as well as improved cross- and up-selling
- Increased the average per client project revenue by 12%
- Increase in employee engagement scores and higher productivity
- The success of the initiative was shared across the global network as a best practice for client facing teams
Organizational Learnings
- Customer centric approach throughout customer engagement lifecycle delivers better results than starting with a price focus
- Listen to and appreciate what customers value, orientate your offering to deliver that value
- Time and cost as basis for pricing is fundamental, however understanding the value of your delivery opens new doors, and improves your profitability
- Your people are capable of more, measure them on the stuff that adds value and let them get on with it.