Professional Services Firm, Large Sales
A global professional services company desired to develop a target account from initial meetings to sustained multi-million dollar relationship.
CHALLENGE
Global Tire OEM—located in same city as a global professional services company’s HQ—had been targeted for many years, yet had never been engaged for any meaningful projects. The project was to develop a strategy for initiating a relationship and building the relationship into a sustained multi-million dollar series of projects.
To help the new CIO transition into his new company and new role, we built a Porter 5 Forces Model for the tire industry, as well as several other items.
SOLUTION
Target client’s change of CIO, and dissolution of their historical relationship with a rival professional services firm due to a failed global ERP implementation over previous 3 years, created an opportunity for engagement. Initial service was pro-bono assistance in launch as new CIO with best practices white papers and advice on how to recover failed ERP implementation. Initial paid project opportunity was a small IT project, which was delivered under-budget and ahead of schedule. Third project was a Vitria middleware project for about $1,000,000 which also was delivered under-budget and ahead of schedule. Two years after initial engagement, client was engaged for $20 million major global implementation of eProcurement software and process changes, completing the successful creation of a sustained client relationship.
Leverage a change in leadership to engage
Provide valuable services and information (inexpensive to provider, valuable to recipient) gratis as ice breaker and to create chances to engage
Over-staff initial project with outstanding team to ensure over-delivery against project targets
Build on success of initial project to successfully deliver larger and larger projects
Use hard-won reputation for successful delivery to land major strategic project
Over a three year period, the relationship was built from $0 per year to $10+ million per year with high satisfaction
The first major project was an IT architecture definition project, which would set the guidelines for evaluating IT projects going forward.
The repeated successful delivery of projects enabled winning the global eProcurement design and implementation, a $20 million project.
