Situation
A Fortune 50 client’s legacy products were sold to enterprise customers using annual contracts. When they wanted to launch into the mid-market, a right-sized business model was needed with a lower cost monthly subscription and online transactions to appeal to smaller customers.
This required the client to launch a new transaction platform and adjust its full suite of products for the mid-market – including:
- Designing appealing and economically feasible products across the full portfolio.
- Adjusting the new sales motion, incentives, and field enablement.
- Architecting business rules for direct sales online.
- Connecting sales to product delivery tools and telemetry.
All efforts had to remain compliant, creating more complexities and costs. We were engaged by one business unit to adapt their products, business rules, and systems to the new customer target and platform.
It was key that the consultant could accelerate the project and reduce upfront Capex.
Action
Our fractional consultant acted as a ‘complexity reduction manager’ to align design choices across workstreams and increase speed to market.
As part of the work, the consultant:
- Design an integrated strategy addressing platform features, sales processes, seller incentives and product delivery.
- Lead executive workshops to align stakeholders, secure buy-in, and prioritize engineering efforts.
- Collaborate across departments to identify and resolve overlapping initiatives.
- Shift the project from a pilot-focused model to a scalable full-scale implementation plan in response to engineering delays.
Results
Over the course of 18 months, the embedded consultant helped the client design solutions and align stakeholders. This work streamlined engineering demands, reduced redundancies and resolved blockers to launch. This resulted in significant cost savings for their operations and a scalable product that met demand expectations, as well as the client’s margin requirement.
