BPO & Corporate Services Case Study

Growth-Focused BPO Aligns Incentives

Introduction

Partnering with a National Staffing Agency

This client is a growing company that provides connections to top administrative, professional and industrial talent, placing more than 150,000 people in temporary and full-time positions across 60 locations in the United States. Desiring a more productive coverage model and greater synergies across business units, this client knew that sales incentives needed to align. By assessing and redesigning its sales compensation program, the company set its sights on incentivizing new customer acquisition, cross-selling across business units, and implementing a profitable management structure across its branches and regions. This client partnered with Alexander Group because of our market reputation, sales comp expertise, extensive knowledge of the industry sector, and successful engagements with BPOs and staffing agencies.

Approach

Clear Goals, Data-Driven Assessment

After consulting with the client, we defined key project goals including:

Developing consistent, well-defined sales compensation plans that support commercial strategy

Ensuring plans are market-competitive

Balancing focus on both top-line revenue and profitability

Offering greater incentives for top performers and cross-selling across business units

Aiming for plan simplicity to improve administrative burden and keep focus on driving business results

Our approach started with an assessment followed by redesign recommendations that align with the project goals. The assessment included 1) clarifying the client’s sales strategy; 2) defining the go-to-market (GTM) structure and roles across business units; and 3) understanding current gaps and pain points with existing incentive plans via comprehensive quantitative analyses. Five significant findings emerged:

Stagnant growth across many branches
Failure to land new customers (consistent, low customer and logo acquisition)
Overlapping account management responsibilities and no clear rules of engagement
No cross-selling between business units
Sales comp plans did not adequately address the issues above, and, worse, were a significant driver of many of the client’s growth challenges

Key Findings

Overcoming Barriers to Success

Potential issues that required further review included:

Sales philosophy differences. Team leaders held fundamentally different philosophies around the role of the “hunter,” and their involvement beyond the initial landing of a new customer.

Plan variation by business unit. We discovered that the same role could vary somewhat across business units given differences in market dynamics and needs. For instance, one business unit specializes in highly paid, hourly placements, while other brands focus on lower-wage, trade-staffing placements.

Market differences. Growth considerations varied for new market entry into urban vs. rural markets.
Plan eligibility. Opinions varied regarding whether recruiters are eligible for sales compensation, and how best to measure their performance.

Crediting rules. Crediting rules vary depending on whether the account is held at the national level or whether placements are made at the local level.

Recommendations & Outcomes

Align Roles, Plans, Incentives

Alexander Group’s recommendations provided a broader context to improve alignment between GTM models and priorities while positioning sales compensation plans to drive desired outcomes. The solutions focused on four priorities:

Align sales compensation plans by incentivizing newly acquired logos while limiting quota credit beyond the initial 12-month acquisition phase.

Define the activities, timing and success criteria to acquire and onboard new customers while ensuring an expansion path before handing off accounts.

Clarify the branch manager’s responsibilities across selling vs. operational duties while redesigning the compensation plan to focus on both top-line growth and branch profitability.

Offer referral incentives as a first step to drive cross-selling across business units, map opportunities across current and potential customers, and curate better segmentation and account lists for sellers.

Alexander Group provided value to our client by increasing potential revenue and profitability through the following recommendations.

Increase new customer conversion

The client aligned the business development manager’s pay with responsibilities, which is expected to increase new customer conversion.

Grow profitable branch-level revenue

We advised the client on strategies to grow branch-level revenue, especially for established branches. Recommendations also aligned growth goals and pay when investing in new markets, potentially leading to increased revenue and profitable growth.

Identify accounts for cross-selling opportunities

Recommendations included improved identification of accounts for cross-selling opportunities and encouraging rep collaboration across business units/brands. This could potentially maximize each customer’s revenue potential and increase branch revenue.

Keep recruiters focused on roles and responsibilities

By providing strategies to keep recruiters focused on activities within their control, there is a potential increase in revenue and profitability.

Additionally, we helped the company navigate the challenges of having separate account executive (AE) and recruiter roles. Recommendations addressed:

Implementing strategic changes can potentially increase profitability by targeting the right markets and customers, clarifying coverage and roles and maximizing operational efficiency.

Helping With Your Biggest Revenue Challenges

From identifying critical go-to-market strategies and investments for corporate services organizations to helping maximize customer retention and increase new customer acquisitions to accelerate growth, Alexander Group can help navigate these complex challenges by offering innovative solutions and helping organizations design and execute their growth path.

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.