Media Case Study

Driving Growth Through Commercial Model Alignment

Challenge

Alignment Between Legacy and Newly Acquired Company’s Commercial Models

Following the acquisition of a new company, an AdTech client sought to establish alignment between two different commercial models. Because of differences in various go-to-market elements (e.g., sales jobs, compensation design), the client needed help to integrate sales models in a way that would maximize future growth opportunities and reduce attrition.

The company aimed to reach their revenue growth targets of 30%, decrease year-over-year attrition by 10% and revise the current legacy commission structure to align with market standards. As a result, the client chose Alexander Group due to the firm’s well-established credibility as commercial go-to-market experts.

Solution

Close Collaboration to Drive New Go-to-Market Strategy

Alexander Group worked closely with the client to align commercial models across both companies, driving efficiency and productivity, while also limiting disruption and turnover. To carry out the client’s request, we began by gathering key information from sales teams and ad agency customers. This review included administering a sales time study to both legacy and newly acquired sellers as well as conducting account-level data analysis to assess the legacy seller activities and go-to-market strategies.

The findings revealed that legacy and newly acquired sellers had drastically different focuses across advertiser types and products. Analysis also showed massive risks with keeping current commission plan designs, specifically huge seller upside for minimal revenue growth.

To resolve these issues, Alexander Group proposed three primary recommendations:

Segmentation and Seller Alignment

Create a segmentation model that clearly delineates the value of customers to the AdTech client to better serve the company’s customers. In this model, sellers were aligned to the appropriate segment based on expertise—with smaller and mid-size accounts owned by one type of seller whereas the largest ad agencies were owned by the most expert sellers.

Compensation Design

Compensation plans were redesigned to align incentives across legacy selling teams. This included a shift from commission to goal-based bonuses, adjusting to a less aggressive pay mix (30/70 to 50/50), increases in base compensation and enhanced leverage for top-performing sellers to maintain a high ceiling for total payout.

Revenue Ops

Alexander Group recommended increased investments in revenue operations activities to support key sales processes and drive seller productivity.

Ultimately, these changes would enable the client to realize their revenue goals as well as help support long-term growth opportunities.

Impact

Swift Implementation Drives Cost Savings and Revenue Growth

Recognizing the value of these recommendations, the AdTech client immediately put Alexander Group’s recommendations into practice. The client also approved additional investments into revenue operations support.

As a result, the client was able to achieve:

Limited turnover of high-performing sellers and corrected behavior of low-performing sellers. During the first six months of the new sales model, the client reported no voluntary turnover. In addition, 40% of sellers achieved annual quota and 15% earned “excellence” designation. This was a significant success given lack of past quotas.

Align Today for Tomorrow’s Growth

Revenue growth has never been more critical. However, achieving strategic goals requires alignment, focus and optimization of your sales investment. Contact Alexander Group to leverage our expertise in assisting growth-oriented organizations in achieving their goals of aligning teams and offering targeted compensation to support growth goals.

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.