Orange Case Study
Following years of acquisitions and mergers, this multinational telecommunications carrier was challenged with meeting its B2B sales goals. The Project Strategy Consulting Group provided the requisite, meaningful insights to help its leaders to correct behaviors that were undermining Orange’s ability to be successful in meeting its strategic goals and objectives.
Overview
Orange is a major multinational telecommunications carrier based in Europe, employing over 175,000 people and with revenues in excess of 50 billion Euro. Following a period of acquisitions, it revised its sales and marketing strategy but was challenged with meeting several of its critical success factor targets, specifically with its business-to-business commerce offerings. After several rounds of internal reviews, the organization engaged the Project Strategy Consulting Group to assist it with understanding where it was failing to execute on its business development activities.
Outcomes
Through a detailed forensic analysis of best practices and Orange’s actual practices, and ongoing dialogues with sales leadership and staff, the Project Strategy Consulting Group was able to determine seven specific elements of the organization’s work activities that – once adjusted – would most likely allow the organization to achieve its target goals. Additionally, we captured the sales team’s and management’s self-assessment of capabilities, allowing us to graphically demonstrate the differences between what they thought they were doing versus what they were actually doing when it came to their business development support and execution activities. Orange complied with our recommendations and is now exceeding the originally established strategic objectives, moving from about 80% of target to over 110% of target in under three quarters of a year.
Summary
As part of the discovery effort, our consultancy was able to discern that known pain points were not being addressed or remediated and that, cumulatively, there were having a deleterious effect on the sales staff’s ability to secure new work. Established processes intended to create uniformity across divisions, child companies, and work groups were actually hindering sales efforts as they did not provide for the requisite cultural and geographic differences in the areas where the sales teams were actively working. Indeed, the company’s recently installed state-of-the-art customer relationship management (CRM) system was not actually providing the detailed information that sales staff needed to perform their job effectually. The CRM in many cases hindered or unduly constrained the sales staff and in some circumstances severely crippled their ability to make the appropriate sales connections or, worse, pitted them against one another for complex service accounts.
