Industrial Manufacturer Overhaul: Double Digit Growth

SITUATION

A national industrial manufacturer with over 14,000 municipal and government agency accounts was scaling its current business for future growth. But increased competition emerged as new technologies were introduced to the marketplace which challenged their dominant market position.

OPPORTUNITY

Since introducing its first product in 1975, the client had produced intermittent but steady single-digit growth with minimal competition in the market. The company’s revenue then fell flat from 2012 to 2015. Outside of its target demographic of fire departments and government agencies, there had been little awareness or growth in the private sector. An urgent need to overhaul each department before scaling the business was necessary to achieve double-digit growth and visibility in new market segments. 

RESULTS

Growth Avenue was brought onto the Advisory Board in 2015 when the new CEO took over. Together, along with one other advisor, they implemented sweeping changes over a 2 year year span across all departments to migrate the business from a lifestyle to growth company. Annual revenues grew 20% year over year from 2015 to 2016 and the company has realized double digit annual growth each consecutive year through 2022. 

Sales Management

• Accelerated leaders, fostered career progression of top talent and managed poor performers out

• Established effective hiring best practices for new hires and a coaching program to help new hires succeed

• Recruited high performance sales talent including a new Vice President of Sales with industry domain expertise in scaling businesses. 

Business Development

• Defined a new go-to-market growth strategy within the company’s core suite of products, identifying new, high potential market segments to drive revenue outside of their existing base.

• Introduced new market channels, partnerships and distribution strategies to augment their existing direct salesforce. 

Marketing

• Created the company’s first branding, positioning and messaging framework to uplevel company positioning, value propositions by market segment, brand promise and tagline. 

• Overhauled the brand portfolio to GILs (job identified labels) to drive coherence and support sales conversions while overhauling key messaging to ensure a single voice was communicated in all marketing collateral and throughout all marketing mediums.

• Combined with a compelling video campaign, time and resources spent educating the new salesforce on the value of the product line successfully expedited deal closures.

Finance

• Redesigned sales compensation plans to align corporate goals with sales targets. 

• Introduced new analysis templates to drive ROI across each product in the portfolio, resulting in inefficiency and cost reduction and more accurate forecasting.

• Negotiated deal terms and CRM, resulting in greater efficiency and more accurate financial planning.