Anand Sagar’s Post

Transcript

Hi. Today I'm going to talk about a case study which is about UH sales operations integration. UM, I was appointed as a UH operations manager for a company who was about to acquire one more company and we were doing the process consulting or doing the process assessment, the kind of you know pipeline side we're gonna integrate, how the people structure is going to be changed and how the systems are gonna be stabilized. So a lot of challenges we had in this specific engagement from consulting perspective. And uh, we had to do multiple hats, UH, joined as the operations manager, then started looking at the technical architecture, then we'll start looking at the process flow, looking in the incentive scheme, so the sales guys and then eventually landed up being you know, into the Board of Directors meetings once just to show our presentation and our thoughts as to how it should work. UH, the entire idea was to stabilize the sales OPS and and that's what we did. So let's see some of the learnings that we had from that engagement and I hope it works out for most of us. But here are the details of the case study that I was talking about. UH Client is a genomics company. It is actually an Indian company and growing very large and aggressively across multiple geographies in the world. And the latest acquisition was another genomics company based out of US and there was a bit of culture gap, there was a bit of structural gap in terms of how the President of the organization was thinking about himself in the in the post merger kind of ecosystem and how the actual acquiring. Company, you should think about their role and how the organization should behave in the target state. So there was a bit of a gap on the alignment of the structure and the kind of expectations from the people perspective. Uh, we had a lot of different systems, small, small systems on both the sides. They all need to be you know consolidated and the pipeline had to be made made sense to the Board of Directors there. The entire idea of this entire merger was that the guys were able to increase the pipeline size and they. To show some synergy to their customers, to their shareholders. But then because the data was so fragmented, they were not even able to visualize that where the pipeline stands today and after the synergy maybe in 3/4 of four quarters or eight quarters, how that synergy will grow from pipeline projection perspective. So the account for casting was a challenge on the people side, roles was a challenge and there was a lot of hesitation in sharing information. And put the sales data, even the technical data as to how many systems you have, how many excels you have, how do you calculate your incentives, who's your, you know and they were favorites in the organization that who should keep this data, who should not see this data. And we had to bring the data and the privacies all to the system, but not to the people into the ecosystem. And also that's the kind of challenges from culture perspective, from people sensitivity perspective that we were dealing with. And obviously there was the Indian part versus the Americans so. In terms of who's the boss, UH, so the idea was to look into eventually UH streamline operations, technology and visibility so that the Board of directors and the actual shareholders of those entire company could see where their company is gonna go in the next four to five quarters. And that's where we started looking into and this company was acquired this American US genomics company, they had some pre historical acquisitions as well. So they were not just carrying their own. Package, they also had some other historical you know organizational data as well. UH, from the other acquisitions which also also needs to be mapped. So it looks like there are three partners of four partners. They all have to come together to a boardroom and they have to talk about who should hold what accounts from here, who should be regional head, how the structure of the organization should look like and what data we have to share to each other on the frequent basis and until the system stabilizes, who will own the data and that's where the things came in. So the first thing that we did as a solution was to. Create a shared service, a small shared service. It was just a poor people kind of thing and in which one was the lead who was reporting straight to the the overall CPU and the Board of directors and he was accountable for all the you know pipeline reporting and account forecasting. And there are three guys who were kind of made accountable for polling and data and systems from different other organizations have acquisitions that we had and they all came together to start consolidating data. The moment we started looking at the data, the data structure was different. It means sometimes the account. Whom we thought was the account, you know payer or sold to was actually a different, you know company or different in our entity in some other you know acquisition because we they were dealing with the same brand but with different entities. So there was no hierarchy in place as to who should do what. So what we started doing was to put the shared services, one guy on the jaw who started looking into all the data hierarchical misspellings and started looking into the the actual Intelligence Report from the board of directors using Salesforce sometime using LinkedIn some other time and started defining the org. Structure within the UH target CRM in our system, the cloud system that we had and we started saying that no more separate systems for anybody. UH we will pick up the data of the largest you know cloud application that we might have had one in one of the acquisitions and we said we will all go on this application for the future and that was the decision period that in future we will work with this best in class Salesforce based cloud CRM for sales service operations and every other day. I will come will be imported here and the data import will go through a data cleansing strategy wherein somebody will look into the account hierarchical data. He will look into the current pipeline, the the, the historical data closes here, look into the contact setup and then then there you know integration to the actual accounts that we were setting up. So both the accounts sold to ship to Bayer, Bayer, the contracts and the contacts that we created all were brought together. It was a very painful process for now. Almost 2 1/2 months when the data cleansing was kind of, you know, done by the shared team. And this data cleaning team had a very heavyweight, you know, thing to handle because people will not sharing data. And the ones which were sharing data was very half cooked data and suddenly the data was kind of, you know, showing different numbers when they used to present to their own team members and their own leaders. So we had to make sure that everybody was transparent and there was a process setup at whatever data you present. If it's not showing up in the dashboard, in the in the cloud CRM, it will not be presented to anybody in the executive level. Because that data is not been cleansed and it's not been reported well, so that the duplication of reporting doesn't happen. The aggregation and cumulative accounting of the data from sales pipeline from account forecasting perspective can be avoided. So that was the first part, data cleansing. And it was, even though it was a human intensive job, uh, it was always, you know, had to be accountable to somebody who knows this account. So we identified 4 to 5 different regional sales head who will be owning the America's you, who will be owning the European view, the APAC part of things. And then it has started saying that you will have go on, you will go on the different team members from that region, even though they are coming from different entities for in the source ecosystem but in the target ecosystem and they will be all be dotted to one regional head. Who will be leading in that that that specific region as a boss and therefore the all the data in the pipeline has to go through him. So there was a consolidation not just from a tech perspective but also from the role reporting perspective. It was a dotted one, but it was still there. A lot of people had a resistance to change that. Now you have acquired me, you are changing my boss as well. So we had to make sure that a bit of you know cushion with their existing boss but also our daughter reporting to a bigger boss across the regional ecosystem that we set up was. So that third part was the data governance. Once the data was cleansed, we don't want the new garbage data to be popped in. So what we said that anybody who has to put new accounts was to put new contacts or new sales opportunities, they have to move to new CRM system from that day. Anything beyond that will not be accepted and will be challenged by their own regional sales sets. So everybody was forced, we we removed everybody's account from their old CRM systems. And make sure that at least the right level access is given to the newer sales CRM and the old CRM systems were only had read level access. They can see their historical data but they cannot update it for anything create an update, they have to come to new system and that was a governance process setup that if you put a new account, if you put a new contact into your new you know geography then you have to come with the right set of process so that the opportunity workflow can be kicked in into one central system and that's how the account forecasting can flow in. It was again a bit of push around for 1/4 or two with all the regional sales heads and the executives of the company. But eventually the governance process did take its own structure and people fall in the line. That's again. So it's not just the data cleansing, but also the data governance after the cleansing has been done and you have to train people, you have to push around a bit with the top executive commitment so that people fall in the line and that's where the systems, the the governance ecosystem, the data and the other. More sensitivity part of you know knowledge sharing was brought to the table. Now we also did a bit of a knowledge management for sales guys and the synergy and the projected synergy was also presented. So we took some of the single solution architects of the company. They came together and we defined the top eight teams, eight teams, which means that in the future now since we have three companies, one of them was acquired today, one of them was acquired in the past and one of one of the parent company. How these three companies can be sold to the market in the future? So we said we will sell with eight things and the entire marketing and related, you know pipeline was getting aligned and tagged with those eight things. So that we know what thing is working for us as part of the synergy part of things and what's The thing is not working for us. And we ran this operation with the executive and the Board of Directors and with regular reporting every at least on a quarterly basis to show which team was picked up from the genomic services perspective, which was for example there was a theme for selling it to specific to the government. It says when it comes to forensic data and kind of other genomic services and there was a it was a huge hit because the government wanted to make sure that all the 9 yards has been covered and they are able to do the right litigations in there. But there were other themes in which they were hardly you know, small, small deals were coming for services business and they were not working out. So we kind of you know said OK we will cater it because we want to maintain the relationship but we will not be able to grow it because. There's no big business there. So we had to consolidate somewhere. We had to push our marketing and the sales UH efforts somewhere else depending upon the theme of marketing and GTM that the guy selected. Last but not the least the customers and partners need to use to be able to quotation systems because there were a lot of people you know sensitivity and people dependency and to some extent even red tapism within their own organizations. What we said that moving forward any kind of quotation which has to go it has to go from 1:00 central system and that where the shared services again came in because the shared services had executive you know reach very much nearby any kind of quotation. We made a very rudimentary CRM form so that people who have to have some codes. They can actually ask for those codes. And once those codes were given UH with with the CEO consultation with the sales operations and the legal consultation, those codes were turned around very fast. And also in favor of those guys who were actually trying to get the quotations internally so that they get the confidence that the system and the process that we had done actually works for them. And that's where I'm saying that the 4th part which is very important is to build trust. If you put a process in place and place and you want the change to happen, you have to drive that change for at least two quarter with full heart as executor. So if somebody expects you to deliver quotations, you turn out those quotations within 24 hours. If somebody expects you to give them legal advice from CDA and NDA, MSA perspective, you turn out very fast. If you keep delaying at executive level at the operations level then the entire merger and stabilization process will will slowly the trust will go away, people will try to go into their own cozy worlds. With their own ex bosses. So you have to build trust. You have to put the process, you have to govern the process and show better results than what they used to have in the past. And that's how the sales operations can be done. It's not just technology. It's about building data, building people, defining roles, making accountability, having the right governance and processes in place and eventually the technology part of it. I hope this session helps. I'll look out for more case studies, discussions with you. Thank you.