A value creation approach to increasing sales efficiency drives 25% revenue growth

The Challenge 

An optical frames and lenses company formed a new centralized sales organization. The goal? To consolidate historically fragmented sales organizations across various frame brands and lenses. They wanted to sell more efficiently—generating more revenue from existing accounts to free up time for sales representatives to acquire new accounts. 

Their primary concerns? Customer experience and organizational efficiencies. Sales groups represented specific brands and employed different sales approaches—but all touched the same accounts and customers. The organization also relied on previously established beliefs for servicing clients, creating a missed opportunity to build a digital experience for their providers and customers. 

Sales leaders wanted a new framework for guiding sales strategy—that was grounded in data—and support for changing established ways of working. That’s where we came in.

An Undeniably Different Approach 

Our multidisciplinary team of customer experience, consumer products, and technology experts came ready to help our client adopt a revenue growth mindset (RGM) and begin building the capabilities to enable it.   

The fundamental basis of our hypothesis-driven approach is to leverage data to identify areas of strengths, differentiation, and opportunity. That's where we, with the help of Alteryx, began to dig deep by: 

• Consolidating multiple years of our client’s data and external industry data sources into an industry-leading optometry database. In a matter of days, we were able to consolidate and validate entries. For duplicative records not identified through fuzzy match methods (e.g., name change, corner addresses, shared/co-located, etc.), Alteryx’s geospatial capabilities allowed us to identify like-for-like locations based on geospatial centroid overlap. 
• Ingesting and analyzing more than 10 million B2B sales transactions records to identify and correlate drivers of sales performance, such as unique sales reps, visits, categories, and brands represented, to financial outcomes.  
• Leveraging data to prove and disprove common beliefs around the needs of customers and sales representatives, such as accounts serviced, brands carried and visit frequency. 
• Employing Alteryx's Business Insights package to correlate trade-area demographics to sales characteristics, supporting product recommendations for areas with similar demographics but underrepresentation of sales characteristics.
• Utilizing account purchasing history to develop a framework for aligning sales activity with client segments based on current sales, account penetration, growth potential, and external market factors. 

With our key takeaways ready for action, we programmed an account playbook strategy into Alteryx for more than 20,000 accounts, providing a prioritization of accounts and opportunities based off internal and external drivers of performance. This exercise helped our client determine the optimal way to service each account in the future—for example, high-touch service for large buyers or accounts with high growth potential versus digitally enabled, lower-touch service for accounts with less growth potential. It also allowed us to define the optimal number of sales representatives required in each region. 

Our recommendations, rooted in data-driven insights and recommendations, were quickly embraced by sales leaders who began taking immediate action.

Real Results 

In just weeks, we were able to diagnose issues and present actionable recommendations in areas from account specific growth opportunities to organization design within weeks.  

Our client is now on its way toward an established RGM model and a true digital, data-driven sales mindset. The entire sales organization for optical frames and lenses now runs based on data and insight rather than hypotheses—making it more responsive to customer needs and preferences. As a result, the organization has increased sales efficiency and revenue. Revenue from existing accounts is estimated to grow by more than 25% with a 20% smaller sales force.