Business Consulting Has Been Around for Decades

Business Consulting in so many iterations has been around for decades. Ditto sales training. Ditto vendor management often referred to as strategic sourcing or procurement. Stewardship has been lauded but too often in terms of marginal value to the SMB space.

Paradigm Consulting is the first to bring concrete ROI attributes to the stewardship discussion. We are the first to apply stewardship to the organization’s client space, the first to use it in the organization’s vendor space. And we’re among the very few tying a straight line from the C suite to the individual contributor and beyond. Below you can discover:

  • Our mission
  • Our approach
  • What the Wall Street Journal is saying
  • ROI attributes
  • The customer’s paradigm
  • A checklist to see if this makes sense for your team

WHAT WE BELIEVE IN

  • Integrity, intent, capabilities, and results are core to our execution on your behalf
  • Building reciprocal relationships in both the customer and vendor arenas to expand stewardship way beyond traditional borders.
  • There is nobility in capitalism. Our efforts will result in increased revenues, reduced costs, and increased sustainability.

OUR MISSION

  • Our mission is to extend the virtues of stewardship to your client base and your vendor base. Specific to the clients, we provide a new paradigm from which to view this most valued asset, one which will increase gross revenues, reduce costs, provide a more sustainable revenue stream, and improve morale.
  • Our role integrates the proverbial C suite with the sales team to provide an integrated, proactive, programmatic, and long-term strategy for your customer’s journey with consumption, value, and retention at its core.

Specific to your vendor space, we provide a new paradigm in which key vendors turn into business assets, where costs reduced while simultaneously improving service levels. And, in some cases, driving business development opportunities.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL PERSPECTIVE

The Management Top 250 ranking, as published in The Wall Street Journal, is based on a holistic measure of corporate effectiveness. The ranking judges overall organizational effectiveness through the lens of 37 indicators that fall under five dimensions of performance. Both our sales and vendor stewardship programs directly and positively impact no less than two:

  1. Customer satisfaction
  2. Financial strength
  3. Employee engagement and development
  4. Innovation
  5. Social responsibility

THE CUSTOMER'S PARADIGM

“Customers want a different response. They want us to make an exception in response to the specifics of their requirements. Responsiveness runs deeper than a friendly voice, good listening skills, a positive attitude, a welcoming website. Customers want more control over their relationship with us. They want to choose who serves them; more influence over the terms of the sale; more choice in the way the product or service gets to them; they want one point of contact, even though their answer may require the cooperation of four different departments. Again, what system of governance is most likely to give the person at the point of contact with the customer the resources, knowledge, and mindset to give the right response?”

From the book “Stewardship” by Peter Block.

STEWARDSHIP DEFINED

Often thought of in biblical terms, the stewardship definition also plays a critical role in today’s business environment. In the world of commerce, stewardship refers to taking responsibility for the business and the effects it has on the world around it. Stewardship involves considering more than just the bottom line and looking at elements such as values, ethics, and morals. Stewardship examples include corporate stewardship, environmental stewardship, and service-oriented stewardship.

A standard definition of a steward is a person given full responsibility for the valuables of another.

They choose service over self-interest, a willingness to be accountable for the well-being of an organization by operating in service, rather than in control.

Stewardship, backed by wisdom, is conducive to a service mindset. Leadership alone is less likely to invoke cooperation and collaboration.

However, for the small to medium business, this is often viewed as too ethereal to help meet day-to-day needs to survive and thrive.

Paradigm Consulting is defining sales stewardship in the context of providing concrete, sustainable results:

  • As an act of governance, sales stewardship directly and positively impacts customer satisfaction and financial strength.
  • To quote Peter F. Drucker, “To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.”
  • It brings the customer into the organization as an asset beyond merely a means of revenue; it aligns the firm’s often disparate functions such as operations, finance, marketing, and product management. Stewardship heightens market sensitivity, reduces internal costs and increases both margins and revenue
  • Leads the organization from transaction-based sales to relationship-based sales
  • It puts the client’s needs first as an act of stewardship

Paradigm Consulting is defining vendor stewardship in the context of providing concrete, sustainable results:

  • As an act of governance, vendor stewardship directly and positively impacts financial strength and social responsibility.
  • Tactically, vendor stewardship redefines how to position the vendor relationships more collaboratively while simultaneously reaching improved levels of service and reduced cost. Other benefits may include:
  • Getting contracts with SOWs (Statements of Work), SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and other critical performance metric documentation
  • Building in a future competitive rate and business downturn protections
  • Strategically, it delivers many elements of Corporate Sourcing* to the SMB space.

*A system where divisions of companies coordinate the procurement and distribution of materials, parts, equipment, and supplies for the organization. Stewardship is a supply chain, purchasing/procurement, and inventory function. It enables bulk discounting, auditing, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

ROI ATTRIBUTES OF SALES STEWARDSHIP

  • Increased Revenues
  • Increase product/service portfolio penetration with existing clients
  • Improve close ratios
  • Opportunity for mutual business development potential with clients
  • Improve Revenue Retention
  • Reduced client churn
  • Reduced services churn
  • Increase Margins
  • By client loyalty and product penetration
  • Sales compensation tied to company financial objectives
  • Overcome your product commoditization.
  • Reduced Costs
  • Sales positions decreased or eliminated
  • Reduced cost of new revenue acquisition
  • Economy of scale
  • Reduced marketing and product management costs

ROI ATTRIBUTES OF THE SOURCING STEWARDSHIP

  • Reduce Existing Costs
  • An existing services rate reduction
  • Downtime
  • SLA compensation
  • Reduce Existing Soft Costs
  • Vendor management costs reduced or eliminated
  • Reduce downtime
  • Service improvement
  • SLA or SLO adherence
  • Project management
  • Reduce Risk
  • Statements of work aligned to key business drivers
  • Contract renewal management
  • SLAs
  • Escalation paths in place
  • Ensuring your technology investments do not outpace your vendors’
  • New Revenue Opportunities
  • Business development opportunity by converting a vendor to a business partner
  • Via enhanced services due to unique vendor relations and offering(s)
  • Strategic Positioning

Ensuring your company does not outrun your supplier’s ability to deliver.

DOES SALES STEWARDSHIP MAKE SENSE FOR YOUR TEAM?

  1. Are all top-line leaders engaged with and benefitting by the sales team’s efforts and results?
  2. Does your firm have a plan to increase market share when the economy changes course?
  3. Does your firm understand when it’s time to move from sales to account management?
  4. Do you have competition that is trying to commoditize the product set to establish a price advantage?
  5. Is your company considering spending money on marketing intelligence to gauge branding alignment and customer satisfaction?
  6. Is your company in need of improved product management?
  7. Are you struggling with communication silos between operations, sales, finance, service?
  8. Are margins increasing at point of purchase, or do you have to lower internal costs to increase margin?
  9. Has your sales approach remained the same for more than five years?
  10. Does the cost of sales increase and decrease in line with company profitability?
  11. How many of your key accounts include your sales team in their annual planning?
  12. Is your customer retention as valuable as new client acquisition, is farming more profitable than hunting?
  13. If you have multiple product/service offerings, are you experiencing double-digit growth in client adoption?
  14. Are you achieving a reduced cost of new client acquisition, or is this cost remaining high?
  15. Has sales management adopted the need for having both “hunters” and “farmers,” or favoring one over the other in the environment?
  16. Are you struggling to break into a new market such as enterprise accounts from the SMB space?
  17. Does your sales team have SOPs for tactical topics such as territory management, Large Account Planning; Greenfield Strategies; Selling to the C Suite?
  18. Is there a clear career path for sales resources in your firm?
  19. If one feels all that sales needs is a good “program,” whether it be a customer loyalty campaign, anyone among the plethora of “sales training programs” or a new CRM, Paradigm Consulting is not the answer. We believe some of these programs are excellent, but what’s needed first is foundational.

Bonus: Indicators That We May Not be a Fit

  1. The desire to hold onto the notion that the sales’ role is complete once the contract is signed. This process is the norm today in many places, including in the Software as a Service industry
  2. Acceptance of “white lies” being acceptable to making the sales
  3. Insistence on having both hunters and farmers in sales. Stewardship sales do not exist with any exclusive hunter roles in sales
  4. The inability of leadership to put sales on the same strategic footing as the other business units
  5.  A B2C environment where the consumer base is not recurring business

DOES SOURCING STEWARDSHIP MAKE SENSE FOR YOUR TEAM?

  1. Are there more than fifteen vendors serving your company today regularly?
  2. When was the last time you had an expert 3rd-party review existing agreements with a critical supplier?
  3. Do you have multiple vendors providing similar services?
  4. Do you have SLAs (Service Level Agreements) in any of the existing agreements? And if so, are they monitored internally?
  5. Have you had collaborative negotiations with key vendors in their delivery to you, your preferred cost models such as OPEX and CAPEX, or are you letting them decide how to sell the service/product?
  6. Are there upcoming mission-critical installations or upgrades being done by parties outside your organization, which, if not executed on time and with precision, would harm the business?
  7. Is your business making any significant capital expenditures in the next three years in areas such as technology, where the state of the offering is currently or will be under rapid development?
  8. Is your firm struggling to reduce recurring costs while maintaining high service levels?
  9. Do you have competition that appears to have an advantage due to their size, providing them leverage for purchasing and services which impact your competitiveness?
  10. Do key vendor agreements have language giving you control of contract assignment in case of a buyout, bankruptcy, etc.?
  11. Do you have or need business downturn clauses in your key vendor agreements?
  12. Do your technology-based contracts have “current market competitiveness” terms in them, protecting your ability to upgrade without the financial penalty?
  13. How many of your vendors have said “no” to a request for service? No’s should be happening on occasion.
  14. How many of your vendors are part of your annual planning?
  15. How effectively are you leveraging your spending in complementary disciplines?
  16. Have you made the distinction between sourcing and procurement? If HR cost was not an issue, would you have a sourcing asset on your team? Supply delegating to an individual contributor role with a clerical focus. Sourcing, however, can have a strategic impact on the organization. When you have an effective strategic sourcing process in place, you’ll find reliable, affordable, and quality suppliers to supply the goods/services. Excellent work here makes the procurement process more streamlined and efficient.