Raj Sharan: Hello everyone. Kevan and I are back for another iteration of the Life Science and Analytics Instruments Vertical podcast. The Alexandra Group is a revenue growth management consulting company. I’m a leader here in our Life Sciences practice. Kevan, my colleague, leads our marketing practice.
Alexander group worked with a company late last year to redesign their marketing organization, including defining vision and charter, creating and updating functions and roles, sizing the team, creating the structure, setting success metrics, and developing a change management plan for a successful rollout.
A few of the issues that the company was facing, Firstly, inconsistency in resourcing and duplication of functions across teams. Secondly, a lack of strategic planning and fragmented execution process. Next, a limited set of holistic KPIs to drive broad growth objectives. And finally, a technology strategy that was not fully comprehensive, nor was it deliberate.
Kevan will next talk through how we approach the engagement.
Kevan Savage: So Raj brought up a very good point around this client engagement. Huge aspirations to look forward at how to design for future success. Very large enterprise with scalability, challenges and needs, and a very large aspiration to accelerate growth in a number of different areas. Coupled with a very complex set of internal stakeholders.
So how we approached the complex needs of this particular organization through this engagement was oriented towards that future vision planning, defining those feature state functions that they needed to scale the marketing and digital organizations and the jobs to support the mix of that functional strategy.
So that meant new marketing functions to be created or considered new digital functions to be created and within a number of related jobs. And to put it in absolute numbers, that was 30 plus new marketing jobs that were identified, up upward of 20 new digital jobs that either existed in some regards or needed to be revised to meet the needs of the current market and the future growth aspirations.
That also meant that we were defining competency areas for new functions and new roles, and upskilling the organization with 30 plus new skills across those competency areas that needed to progress the talent strategy of not only acquiring new roles in those new functions but also retaining the talent and growing the talent and that investment they’ve made in the talent today.
It also meant sizing for the right scalability. Looking at the number of resources that were deployed against certain sets of activities and the results-oriented to those activities. The manager’s ability to guide strategy to execution and their level of skills today, but also what’s needed for tomorrow.
But looking at talent and the functions and the profiles needed for the future and the competencies and skills is one part. Where we matched that strategy was with performance data and benchmarks. And we found a few interesting things. One was when we looked at the revenue per marketing and digital resource productivity. So the per resource productivity was 10 million on an annual basis compared to our benchmarks of nine to 13 million. So we knew that we were in range to benchmark of how to get better resources per productivity, but to scale, to meet the organization’s growth objectives, we needed to get closer to that 13 million side of the range.
We also looked at pipeline contribution and productivity of that pipeline and demand generation. And one of the interesting areas that we uncovered was that marketing and digital employees were driving 15 to 20 billion in annual funnel. We wanted to amplify that. That was great to find. And so what we looked at was how effective was the marketing organization, digital organization at generating that relative to other sellers’ productivity?
And what we found is that while the marketing and digital teams were generating great funnel and pipeline results, they were generating two to almost three x what a sales-related role was driving. So we wanted to amplify that and tie that back to resource productivity relative to the investment. So how we did that is we’ve repositioned headcount efficiencies, field new investment and new roles in commercial, marketing, digital, but also with the realized 2 million plus in net savings that came from the output of this activity.
So a great project, a great engagement across a very complex organization, but very much designed for future success. And now this organization is in the market with new strategy, new talent, new campaigns, new activities, and we’re very, very excited to hear about their next wave of growth relative to this engagement.
So Raj, I know you’ve stayed in touch with the client on a frequent basis. What are some of the other results that the company has realized as an output of this particular engagement?
Raj Sharan: Thank you, Kevan. Yes, we’ve stayed in touch. The company’s investment in commercial marketing has driven a more effective, scalable, and modern organization.
They were able to deploy the model that the Alexander group designed, they were able to hire into the new roles that the Alexander Group designed. There is more accountability now, a significantly more emphasis on attribution and the marketing team is impacting revenue more relative to the past.
To learn more, visit www.alexandergroup.com for events, benchmarks and other valuable insights. Please do reach out to Kevan or myself to discuss more. Thank you.
