Achilles Group
Size: £35m - £70m
Global supply chain auditing, accreditation and management
The project
Achilles Group was a £35m global supply chain and compliance business operating out of 23 countries. It was an international leader and partner of choice in supply chain risk and performance management.
Its’ business model was highly effective in creating and managing multiple global networks of collaborative industry aligned communities, working to bring cost efficiencies for the top companies with direct sales consultants, and delivering supplier accreditation and auditing services for their supplier.
More than 850 of the world’s leading buying organisations and in excess of 150,000 key suppliers joined Achilles’ network across 30 different communities in 11 industry sectors across the globe.
The challenge
Achilles had recently been acquired by a private equity firm, which believed the company was significantly under-performing its market potential, despite delivering moderate growth and profitability.
The problem arose mainly from the ‘federated’ nature of Achilles’ growth over many years, with individual regions developing local business and skills that were neither enhanced nor shared as best practice across the group.
Our brief was to evaluate global potential and identify and share sales best practice to accelerate business growth.
David joined the senior management team at Achilles as interim Sales Director and, over the course of 12 months, was instrumental in driving a positive change of mentality and focus. He can develop, drive and support substantial improvements in sales performance in a short space of time. Firm but fair he quickly gains the respect of those around him.”
Kevin Gaskell
Private equity chairman, entrepreneur & leadership speaker
(formerly Executive Chairman, Achilles)
The solution
We carried out an extensive sales best practice audit of the sales team’s knowledge, skills, processes, and systems. Once complete, we designed and delivered in-country and online coaching of 180 multinational field salespeople and approximately 200 internal salespeople, with long, complex sales processes.
We also implemented better major account management and planning processes, sales pipeline management and process improvement, strategic account acquisition, forecasting, pricing, recruitment and training.
This was backed by compensation schemes and CRM system (Microsoft Dynamics) development, a successful launch and rollout of a new carbon management scheme, and the development of several sales planning, account management and pipeline management tools to support the programme.
The impact
Within ten months, our solutions had generated a 52% annual increase in new business sales, doubled the sales pipeline and achieved an average 39% reduction in the length of the sales cycle.
As a direct result, this helped Group revenues increase to £45m in the second year and to £70m+ in the following year. Key success factors included the desire of all six global regional managers to engage in the programme, the support and focus of the group business executive board, and the skills and expertise shared among multinational sales teams.