Introduction
A global producer of premium linear and digital content with an extensive portfolio of brands that garner a wide variety of key audiences required assistance with the long-term transformation of their global enterprise. However, the company had undergone multiple M&A events, which left them with an inconsistent HR structure for their 1,300 Ad Sales team members.
The company required a new Holding Company (HoldCo) oriented, portfolio-wide go-to-market strategy to position their ad sales roles and teams to better serve their customers and garner stronger results. They chose Alexander Group because of our expertise in the media sector, proprietary benchmarks and experience aligning our clients’ sales team’s roles and compensation to strategic business goals.
Project Approach
Alexander Group’s industry experience shows that sales teams are most effective when job roles are clearly defined with appropriate rules of engagement, performance expectations, skills and competencies, career pathways and transparent pay expectations.
Sales compensation is of primary significance and should clearly state incentive eligibility, pay mix and pay levels. Since the client had undergone multiple M&A events, the Ad Sales teams had an inconsistent array of roles, expectations and incentive plans.
Key Findings
Plan eligibility and exemption analysis
Pay mix and pay bands
Career paths and job leveling
Job profiles and competency program
Incumbent slotting
Recommendations & Outcomes
Project outcomes were both revealing and provided momentum for further HR improvements. The client recognized approximately $9MM in cost savings because of Alexander Group’s work. The scope covered 1,300+ incumbent roles in the ad sales organization. Cost savings were identified as a result of standardization efforts, including reduction of duplicate roles/headcount which ultimately presented the client with a 4x ROI on the engagement.
While the standardization project was not cost neutral, it created an infrastructure for our client to:
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.