Improving collaboration between sales and back office teams added 30% more sales within three months.

Success highlights

Increasing sales
Added 30% to quarterly sales performance through improved collaboration.
Faster project delivery
Reduced internal turnaround time for new projects by 25%.
Breaking down work silos
Increased cross-functional knowledge sharing and collaboration across the organisation.
Greater staff engagement
Staff reported an 80% improvement in their engagement and morale.

A B2C Service provider had gone through a period of considerable change and was suffering from poor performance.

The staff felt demotivated, teams did not collaborate, and there was a feeling that no one was taking any initiative.
Senior management complained about spending too much time in meetings, dealing with operational matters.
Middle management blamed for lack of leadership and much of the lower level staff cynical about attempts to improve morale.
Sales were down despite a booming market.
Internal cost increases put pressure on the profitability of the business.

Creating internal support for change:
Instead of a traditional consulting approach to team selection and strategy design, we asked volunteers to apply to be part of the initiative and ensured they took full ownership of decisions and actions. It created deeply felt ownership of the change and overcame internal cynicism.
Raising morale and motivation to negate the negativity:
As a first step, we helped the team to design and implement a framework of activities aimed at improving morale and scaling positivity over time.
Avoiding change fatigue keeps improvements flourishing:
Using an approach based on agile development, we co-created a program of small step initiatives to address objections and build internal support for the change.

Improving cross-team collaboration to support in times of pressure:
We coached the teams to self-create aligned definitions of success that supported both: achieving the desired business outcomes and recognising the different aspirations and cultures of the teams & their team members. As a result, different teams supported each other, alleviating pressure in sales and product development teams allowing more customers to be served, better, leading to positive customer feedback and higher sales.
Realigning focus on customer service makes customers happy:
Taking the team through practical exercises to enhance their ability to develop empathy for their customers’ needs, enabling them to find suitable solutions quicker. For external customers, this lead to shortening of the sales cycle, for internal customers it meant less time in meetings, more acceptable solutions and less rework.

Over the period of the program and beyond, the client reported significant improvements in:

Productivity 25%

Collaboration 45%

Engaged staff 80%

Initiative 75%

Sales increases 30%