Prioritizing Target Opportunities: Deploying Targeted Sales Resources to Drive Market Share Growth

Executive Summary

A global ITO and BPO service provider’s banking and capital markets business unit needed to prioritize more than 80 potential target buyer accounts in order to most appropriately deploy its sales resources. Everest Group utilized its proprietary Account Readiness methodology to establish clear target priorities per outsourcing likelihood over a two-year period, thereby enabling the provider to effectively organize its sales force to drive optimum performance.

The Client’s Challenge

The client had a list of nearly 100 prospects by industry vertical and geographic region. But with the average cost of pursuing an outsourcing deal to conclusion approaching two percent or more of total contract value for multi-million dollar opportunities – and pushing four percent for very large, complex deals – the importance of getting the right resources focused on the right opportunities at the right time was enormous. After several unsuccessful efforts to orient the sales organization to the highest potential target opportunities, the client determined it needed fact-based insights into each of the targets’ propensity to consider outsourcing, and resolution on how to sell to a disparate set of companies, especially in deploying the best talent to the most promising opportunities. Sales leadership also wanted to determine the most opportune time to start engaging with a particular prospect.

Insight to Action

The Everest Group team began by combining externally available public information on large banking and capital market organizations with data from its own proprietary knowledge and data bases. It then utilized its proprietary Account Readiness statistical framework to:

• Analyze business events (e.g., M&A activities, regulatory changes, a new C-suite executive, or operations expansions) which might drive each prospect’s need for transformation
• Evaluate the relative likelihood and timing of each prospect’s pursuit of an outsourcing initiative within 24 months
• Synthesize the findings into a prioritized matrix of target companies and the recommended pursuit strategy for each one

Everest Group worked in collaboration with the client through each stage of the process to ensure the results would empower it for decisive action.

Impact

The engagement significantly reduced the provider’s cost of sales pursuit, enabled it to correctly and confidently restructure its sales force organization and specific sales representative assignments to align with the prospect reprioritization, and helped the selling team become better prepared when approaching likely buyers. As a result, sales force productivity increased measurably, resulting in substantial market share growth.