Global Teamwork to Increase Share of Global Accounts

SOLUTION

After determining key goal metrics with top management and interviewing front-line managers and engineers, Global Partners Training tailored its Strategic Account Alignment™ training program for an ST rollout in three stages, as follows:

1. Pre-Workshop Preparation

• First, a series of preparatory conference calls were held between ST University, Global Partners Training and the account sponsors. During these calls, the overall objectives were set and the teams were confirmed. The teams were both global and cross-functional and had up to 15 members, including people from the regional side who interact locally with customers and understand local issues and opportunities. From the product side, team members understood ST’s products and solutions currently applied at the accounts and those that could be applied to address customers’ global and local challenges and opportunities.
• Next, a series of conference calls were held with the teams. During these calls, the cross-functional teams defined the needs for relevant information and outlined issues and opportunities with the customer. An Account Planning Guide was used to collect and organize all the information coming from multiple countries.
• As many as 50 individual items were raised during the conference calls. Items were synthesized and organized, then used during the workshop to drive planning and discussion.

2. Face-to-Face Workshops

• At the start of each workshop, it quickly became apparent that although all team members were executing what they believed to be the right strategy, they have not been able to align their actions with others, resulting in an uneven and sub-optimized approach to working with the account on a global scale. With that understanding, a challenging ‘stretch’ vision for the account development and key objectives were defined together and agreed to by all team members.
• After common visions and objectives were established, one of the first workshop activities was building a map of customers’ complex global organizations and identifying key issues for each of its parts. One of the typical outcomes from this activity was an understanding and appreciation that existing structures and historical relations with customers were inadequate and outdated, as the size and complexity of customers’ organizations may have changed through growth, especially growth through acquisitions.
• Next, using the data from the planning conference calls, the participants worked in subgroups to build alternative strategies for each of the key objectives established earlier. Then for each strategy a set of tactics, actions with milestones and metrics were created. Each team member was assigned responsibilities for implementation.

3. Follow-up and Final Reviews

• The objectives, strategies, actions and milestones were collected, reviewed and updated by participants on a regular basis.

RESULTS

Throughout the next several months, the ST teams used their account plans as it conducted a series of guided conference calls to track and measure implementation. Here is a snapshot of some of the short-term results from this program:

• 20-80% increases in share of customer
• 3-4x increases in revenue from some customers
• New relationship structures that connected peers to peers, including top-level executives, with longer-term benefits
• Global teamwork enhanced internally for ST as well as customers’ global and local organizations
• Trust with customers taken to a new level of partnership, as evidenced by things such as shared websites, collaborative planning and co-development activities