Sample Case Studies

Go-To-Market Strategy for a global Salesforce consulting player

The problem statement at hand was to develop a go-to-market strategy for an acquired company and ensure that by the end of first year post legal close, the acquire company captures the projected synergies of approx. $ 25 Million. Our team did a deep dive account white space analysis and based on that arrived at ten potential accounts to land and expand with the acquired company offerings. To enable the client facing teams, we prepared combined capability offerings collaterals, positioned qualified case studies and staff with required competencies. In summary, we supported the client sales staff with a well-defined differentiated offering, teams who can speak from their experiences around working on unique digital transformation consulting assignments for global clients in financial services sector. Along with this we carved out an investment budget that we invested in developing proof of concepts for clients, and deployed a small team of architects who could develop these early-stage solutions and provide a proof of our ability to appreciate the business challenges and address them. To manage the interactions at scale, we developed rules of engagement that would provide guidelines to solve potential areas of conflict, right to opportunity etc. And lastly, a crystal-clear incentive plan for cross-up selling offerings. At the end of first year, we overachieved the target by 25% and closed the year with about $ 30 Million.

Technology Roadmap for a global consulting firm focused on the financial services sector:

The problem statement was to define a technology roadmap that would align the business processes and associated operating model of a consulting organization with that of a technology services organization. Both organizations, distinct in culture, ways of working, and decision making and being a consulting organization it was critical to ensure that business processes and agility of business doesn’t get slowed down with any additional layers of institutional hierarchy. The action we took was to break the overall consulting business into various cohorts of specific process areas, and went into the details of the process, action owners in the process, data integrity maps, and complexity of application integration. For every process area we mapped the as-is to a to-be and based on the assessment across various dimensions we arrived at the alignment feasibility score and change effort score. The acquired organization was having a base of operating across sixteen different countries so post the assessment we shifted gears and looked at prioritization and technology implementation roadmap along with areas that would require additional investment for solution development. After taking into consideration, business user, criticality of business processes, we came up with a 2-year implementation roadmap, starting with three functions in the first cluster – procurement, risk & compliances and marketing. The results with the first batch has been better insights to pipeline from several accounts, cost reductions from technology platform unification and associated licensing costs, and higher visibility to risk and mitigation plans.

Value Creation Playbook development for a programmatic acquirer

 A serial acquirer had a unique challenge. Over the years the corporate development team, made forward looking business case projections, however, immediately after legal close they would hand over to the business unit for realizing the business case. The outcome was in almost all cases the real synergies weren’t realized as they were never able to integrate businesses. All acquisitions operated independently, even though they were strategic acquisitions, they operated more like a portfolio company and over a period of time the mandate from the board was to come up with a model to align all past acquisitions and have a framework to drive future acquisition value creation & integration. As our first step we analyzed, the acquisition rationale of all past acquisitions, understood the active deals in pipeline and the business case formulation. This gave us a sense of various types of acquisitions that were being taken-up, understand the fabric of company in terms of structure of corporate functions and business units. We structured the acquisitions into three archetypes – capability adjacencies, new bets, and scale play and prepared a playbook that by two sections(value creation & functional integration), value creation primarily focused on a methodology for realizing go-to-market and topline synergy growth assumptions and functional integration focused on HR, Finance, IT, Legal, Compliances, Marketing, Procurement. For both the sections we defined a catalogue of activities by timeline, by ownership and by acquisition archetype that needs to be undertaken all the way from pre-signing of the deal to full assimilation. The results were well received, and the board referred the playbook to other independent group companies for delivering on the acquisitions. Today it’s the de-facto reference for all acquisitions for all inorganic investments which are to the tune of approx. $ 500 Million in acquired revenue per year.

Brand Equity Assessment & Market Positioning

A material acquisition post close had a unique challenge of sharpening the joint offerings positioning, drive target campaigns and improve lead generation funnel. Before we could get into the positioning of the offerings, we had to understand the customer’s mind share when it came to client’s as well as its acquired company brand. Along with that we also did a competitor assessment, peer assessment, and white space analysis for both client and its acquired organization. These assessments were run by having customized questions and interviewing about twenty-five customers. We collected both objective inputs to survey questions as well as subjective inputs to online questionnaires. Based on all data points we plotted the current positioning of our client and its acquired company by overlaying its offerings & customer brand recall value on a S.W.O.T framework. We also prepared battle cards for white spaces, based on peer/competitor assessment which included specific customer accounts, white space and offerings pitch. The results of this assessment was by the end of one year, post implementation of our recommendations by the go-to-market teams, the joint mettle of the client and its acquired organization had gone up in the industry analyst quadrants by several notches. The brand recall for both organizations got better compared to what they were lacking a year back and there were several evidences of brand equity value improving based on being able to deliver on the brand promise and charge premium rates.