Background and Challenge
L.E.K. Consulting's client, a leading manufacturer of professional audiovisual equipment and technology, had a strong portfolio of product brands.
The organization sought a transformation from product brand-centric to customer-centric in order to turn around the business’ performance.
The client faced tremendous pressure from its parent company to make a quick but sustained turnaround. Internally, changing the cultural norms to a customer-centric model required strong buy-in and trust in us.
Approach and Recommendations
- Identified current organizational challenges and strengths
- Designed new customer-centric global organization
- Developed a sales and marketing strategy structure focused on unique customer verticals, to drive customer intimacy and uniqueness where it mattered
- Helped engineering/R&D, operations and marketing communications structures focus on unlocking opportunities to leverage the organization’s scale
- Refocused back-office structures on how to best support the new organization
- Set up a project management office that defined work streams, mobilized teams, communicated the transition and completed effective change management
- Facilitated and tracked employee placements and sales rep account assignments
- Assisted in the redesign of numerous policies, processes and programs, including sales compensation and product pricing
Results
The new model was rolled out with very positive feedback from the business’s employees and customers around the globe. They fully understood the need for the change and were excited to see it happening. The new model allowed the company to bring the full range of its products and services to individual customer segments as solutions to their specific needs rather than simply a basket of products.
We were lauded by top management throughout the process for the strength, thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the work on the model design and implementation, and for working very collaboratively with their team.
“We had some ideas on where we wanted to go as we started, and L.E.K. brought strategic process around being focused and disciplined, especially given we were working with a tight deadline. L.E.K.’s experience with other companies and benchmarking and best practices provided a valuable perspective. I really enjoyed how in-depth L.E.K. got as a consultant. Oftentimes, bringing folks in from the outside, you get superficial analysis, but L.E.K. was able to get pretty deep in a short amount of time. The insights and information L.E.K. put together were great, and were shared with our chairman and CEO and were really well-received and respected at the highest level of our organization. We really appreciate the effort from the L.E.K. team; they really dug deep and got to the level of detail we were looking for.”
— VP of human resources (project sponsor), client
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