Blue Coat: Better Business Decisions Through Annual Sales Benchmarking

Situation: Blue Coat Systems Inc. is a fast growing company that sells hardware and software for securing Web communications and delivering enterprise applications over wide area networks (WANs). Over their first 10 years, Blue Coat went through many product evolutions, acquired other companies and grew into a solution-oriented, multi-product, multi-faceted organization. The sales organization had become increasingly complex. With a completely channel supported fulfillment model, the company wanted to enable their partners to do more independent selling. Additionally, they needed to transition from a product-focused to a solution-selling approach.

With its sights set firmly on growing into a billion-dollar company, Blue Coat Systems had established a strong leadership team with the vision to get there. Now they needed to align the sales organization around that goal.

Challenge: Blue Coat Systems asked Alexander Group to help develop a strategic perspective of how to scale the sales organization to accommodate their growth trajectory, an outside view of where they were as a sales organization. This would provide a baseline on sales cost and productivity and a multi-year blueprint for understanding key inflection points in the evolution of Blue Coat’s sales model and organization on the road to $1 Billion.

Solution: Alexander Group produced a complete sales assessment and roadmap for Blue Coat Systems. Benchmarking was introduced early in the project to establish a factual viewpoint and provide a quantitative complement to the analysis of sales coverage, productivity, investment and compensation. Alexander Group interviewed board members, sales people, executives and Blue Coat customers and partners for an end-to-end look at customer engagement. Early findings showed that the expense-to-revenue ratio was high compared to the industry benchmark, and we focused on recommendations to grow the top line faster. We helped Blue Coat make and validate smart decisions around covering partners, driving solution selling, investing in inside sales, pooling and specializing sales engineers. We developed competitive compensation plans to attract talent and drive relevant product focus, and identified best practices to effectively integrate sales teams from acquisitions. Alexander Group now participates in annual sales planning with Blue Coat and continues to help evolve the sales model as Blue Coat enters new phases of growth.

Benefit: Annual sales benchmarking and assessment enable Blue Coat Systems to make fact-based, informed business decisions to align sales investment and productivity with corporate goals and objectives.
This ongoing evaluation provides a consistent baseline of internal and external metrics to measure against in a changing sales environment. The leadership at Blue Coat values the external unbiased and unvarnished opinions from Alexander Group, and the strategic advice provided helps them to continuously evaluate and improve their sales organization. Blue Coat Systems asked Alexander Group to help develop a strategic perspective of how to scale the sales organization to accommodate their growth trajectory, an outside view of where they were as a sales organization. This would provide a baseline on sales cost and productivity and a multi-year blueprint for understanding key inflection points in the evolution of Blue Coat’s sales model and organization on the road to $1 Billion.

Download a PDF of this Case Study.