Developing and delivering a sustainable capability programme to upskill principal consultants to influence in complex sales environments, enabling growth of new revenue by an average 10% per consultant.
The key learnings I took away from this programme have played a major role in my accomplishments over the past few months since the programme. Applied Influence’s consultants were phenomenal in their delivery. It has been a pivotal moment in my career.
Principal Consultant, Capco
The challenge
As a leading financial services consultancy, it is a high priority for Capco to ensure an exceptional level of client management and growth capabilities throughout their organisation.
Applied Influence have been engaged with Capco over the last five years to upskill their principal consultants to enable greater depth of client understanding, an improved ability to support the resolution of client issues, and to subsequently accelerate and deliver sales revenue growth.
Issues to overcome included:
- Several participants were new to Capco and lacked depth and breadth of client and industry knowledge.
- All delegates were newly promoted to principal consultant level, and had little senior leadership and/or complex sales experience.
- Capco’s target clients were frequently siloed organisations, with multiple, often conflicting stakeholder groups and many delegates lacked influence capability at this level of complexity.
The solution
For the past 5 years we’ve partnered with Capco to develop a capability programme, delivered across two days, for 40 principal consultants per year. The virtual, interactive programme focused on the skills and tools required for individuals to lead large team sand influence client decision making to enable business growth for both Capco’s clients, and Capco themselves.
Achievements included:
- Building capability to apply Stakeholder Profiling, including Stakeholder Desires and Fears to show empathy and understand stakeholder motivations and concerns about a shared release plan.
- Developing skills to adapt approaches for each stakeholder to ensure it resonates with their personal agenda.
- Sharing the application of human-centred engagement models to clients to identify opportunities for creating additional value from existing Capco relationships.
- Training in the use of Influence Campaign tools to allow delegates to understand different client personas more acutely, including their motivations, way of interacting, and end-goals.
- Leading practical activities to demonstrate how to influence a positive client outcome based on the person you are dealing with at that moment.
- Upskilling delegates to be able to lead their teams through the education and listening models learnt from the programme, including the power of communication, different types of listening, and positioning and steering business conversations.
The outcome
Participants created new pipeline opportunities, sold additional resources, and accelerated billing as a direct result of applying their learnings from the programme. Some examples:
- A participant won a new vendor data remediation project, worth £1.4m in new revenue.
- The capabilities developed on the programme positively impacted a tier- one client by discovering hidden opportunities. This created a 10% incremental value to Capco pipeline.
- Short term influence plan techniques enabled acceleration to ‘yes’ by 6 weeks, delivering increased revenue of 10%.
Participants prepare more efficiently as a team for key client meetings. As a result, they now have a wealth of team’s knowledge behind them and need fewermeetings to achieve their outcomes.
Leaders have confidence that their teams are unified with agreed goals.
As a result of their involvement in the programme, Capco’s team of principal consultants were significantly more skilled andconfident with client management. This directly led to the acceleration and delivery of an average 10% uplift in sales revenue.
The story in numbers
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