Commercial Construction

The Ask

A $500M commercial construction/land development company headquartered in Europe was looking to launch a dedicated business development function to support the North American sales organization. Our initial assessment uncovered that less than 3% of revenue came from any type of inside support role and no role definition existed anywhere in the organization.  Once submitted, Holland Pipelines was selected to build out the business development function, system and team to deliver a 10% share of the revenue line at the 18-month mark.

The Challenge

Once we dug into the sales organization, we uncovered 2 very clear challenges.  1. The sales teams didn’t understand the role of business development and saw it as a clear threat or competition to their books of business.  2. 64 salespeople had 64 methodologies for finding leads.

The Solution

Our solution had 3 tracks running concurrently.

Role Definition

The business development role was to be focused on pure relationship cultivation, which fed directly to the field sales teams and transactional sales or smaller deals to be closed in-team without the need for longer, complex sales cycles.

Inter-Departmental Relationship Building

We spent much of our first 3 months traveling to the various regions conducting needs analysis and training to ensure full adoption from the sales teams to eliminate the state of resistance.

Team Structure and Scaling

As we structured the on-boarding and training of the new business development representatives, it was important they were going to be in lockstep with the field sales reps. We built the team so each field sales representative had assigned and dedicated business development representatives.  This created a inter-departmental regional pod structure for the regions to compete with one another.

We closed the contract with a trusted, well-oiled machine between business development and field sales.  The goal was to achieve 10% revenue share at the 18-month mark.  We exited at 6 months with a 17% revenue share.

Outcome

“Holland Pipelines helped us create function and efficiencies that had been dysfunctional.  This was a heavy lift and wouldn’t have been achieved without this partnership.”

Managing Director, North America