Improving Win Rates for Large Deals for a Global Service Provider

Executive Summary

A global service provider’s win rate in large, North America-based deals had dropped over time and was falling short of performance expectations. Leaders of a key business unit engaged Everest Group to conduct an independent assessment of the decrease drivers and make recommendations for improvement. Based on the comprehensive findings, Everest Group recommended to the provider a variety of immediately actionable initiatives – focused on internal sales process improvements, pricing validation, and sales strategy improvements – all of which have the potential to lead to a win rate performance improvement of 25 to 45 percent in large, competitive deals over the near- to medium-term.

The Client’s Challenge

The service provider’s own internal assessment revealed not only that its recent win rate on large deals in North America was low compared to historical figures, but also that there was significant variance in win rate performance across deal sizes, industry types, new business acquisitions versus renewals or extensions of existing business, and outsourcing service areas (ITO, HRO and FAO). The provider realized the need for corrective action, but lacked the resources, data, and insights to detect the problems and determine the best improvement course.

Insight to Action

The service provider’s sales team engaged Everest Group to identify its win rate drivers and success constraints, and define actions to address the gap between them. The Everest Group team worked with the provider’s sales leadership to select a representative sampling of deals from the previous 18 months in the large, competitive deal space. Everest Group conducted a set of analysis and a series of interviews with deal pursuit teams, clients and the third party advisors for the sample deals. This enabled Everest to develop a view of the common themes behind the deal performance. Everest also supplemented this primary analysis with a secondary analysis of the internal sales processes, proposals and deal pursuit data as well as an analysis of data from Everest experience and research. The analyses enabled Everest to identify common themes and formulate hypotheses around the key drivers of win rate performance, which led to the development of actionable recommendations to improve the provider’s win rate. Everest developed actionable recommendations to address four key challenges in large, competitive deals. These actions covered multiple aspects of the deal pursuit process, including adjustments to the internal sales process, strategic priorities for specific market segments, validation of deal pricing, and the formulation of proactive counter-attack plans for competitive threats. 

Impact

The results of Everest Group’s recommended actions and implementation of four specific initiatives target win rate performance improvements between 25 and 45 percent. These initiatives focused on retooling the sales process for large deal pursuits and restructuring the client’s pricing strategy. The sales process improvements yielded better utilization of the firm’s resources, debottlenecking specialist availability so they could contribute at key points in the pursuit process and promoting consistent use of highly effective sales talent (directly or via active coaching of the on-the-ground team). Based on analysis of both wins and losses, the client adopted new pricing frameworks and policies to support more competitive proposals across markets and lines of business.