Introduction
Manufacturing Client Faces Growth Challenges Driven By Silos in Various Regions
A private equity-owned manufacturing client was failing to hit growth targets, experiencing flat growth driven by industry tailwinds in recent years. Internally, the organization’s historical business unit alignment in the Americas and EMEA had created silos, emphasized by highly technical sellers with relatively low commercial expertise and acumen.
In its current state, the client deployed business unit-specific field sellers as the predominant customer-facing role and application engineers as overlays to provide specific product expertise. To increase above-the-funnel market demand and lead generation, the client sought to identify areas of productivity inefficiencies and develop actionable steps to drive growth.
With a desire to understand industry-best practices and obtain an objective opinion of their current go-to-market (GTM) model, C-level leaders knew of Alexander Group’s expertise in go-to-market transformations and design and, thus, made the strategic decision to engage with us to help them drive desired growth.
Approach
Collaborative Sales Design to Gain Stakeholder Support
Alexander Group began by conducting a thorough discovery to understand the strengths, weaknesses and challenges of the client’s current go-to-market approach through qualitative interviews, quantitative account and seller analysis. Through collaborative design sessions with cross-functional, business unit and sales stakeholders, Alexander Group moderated design sessions that focused on each of the go-to-market opportunities for optimization. The sessions were iterative, building upon previous decisions using a broader network of stakeholders to gain buy-in and support for the changes.
Key Findings
Optimizing Targeting and Segmentation for Revised Sales Roles
Given the historical siloed business units, the client did not have a clear approach to prioritize accounts based on buying behaviors and cross-sell potential. In alignment with the new sales compensation structure, the client bolstered their nascent Inside Sales function, as well as formalized a key account program.
Alexander Group worked with the client to develop the criteria for defining key accounts and building account plans to map out a formalized account management program. Alexander Group also helped the client define characteristics of accounts that would be covered by inside sales to drive increased productivity of sellers focused on customer segments that reflected a book and turn buying pattern.
Recommendations and Outcomes
Aligning Sellers with New Business Units and Refining Compensation Plans to Motivate Solution Selling
Alexander Group’s recommendation to reorganize sellers to multiple business units, given similar technical complexity among other deciding factors, created the opportunity to refine compensation plans to motivate solution selling across multiple business units, as opposed to just the seller’s legacy business unit. These efforts were supported by Alexander Group’s design of a multi-measure plan, in which each seller had a measure for their total revenue and a separate measure for revenue from newly aligned businesses.
Alexander Group anticipates that upon greater go-to-market transformation and new role alignment, sellers would start to be paid against their new measures.
Driving Business Growth With the Right Expertise
Leveraging industry knowledge and go-to-market and sales compensation expertise, Alexander Group helps manufacturing clients identify misalignments to overcome siloes and drive business growth. Contact us today to learn more.
About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.
© 2025 The Alexander Group, Inc.® (AGI)