Increasing Consulting Sales |
Atos Origin is a leading international IT services provider, providing integrated design, build and operate solutions to large multi-national clients in carefully targeted industry sectors.
Atos Origin is one of the few companies that can provide all the 'design, build, and operate' elements of a business solution. More than 60% of the revenue base is recurring, deriving from multi-year outsourcing and application maintenance contracts, and they deliver this within a global framework of three major Service Lines – Business Consulting, System Integration and Managed Operations. They are a leading partner, supplying technology and services to the Olympics.
The Need
Atos Consulting are the business consulting arm of Atos Origin and have over 300 consultants in the UK providing a wide range of business consulting services to both private and public sector clients. As part of their growth strategy, there was an increasing need for consultants at all levels – not just partners – so play an active role in business development. For many of the consultants, this was a step outside of their main domain expertise.
The Solution
Greenbank was engaged in 2005 to develop a tailored programme to build advanced, client-focused business development skills within the broad Atos Consulting community.
To avoid tying up the consultants for long workshops, we split the programme into 3 modules allowing for consolidation of skills in between workshops following the Greenbank buying cycle
Module One, Understanding Clients Needs, focuses on skills and processes needed to increase a consulting sales pipeline, from questioning skills, building rapport and account entry strategies. It also introduces the innovative, colour-based INSIGHTS personality tool to allow consultants to be effective even when dealing with clients who are very different to them
Module Two – Proposing a Winning Solution, builds competitive selling skills focusing on understanding clients buying criteria, writing compelling client-focused sales proposals and high-impact sales presentations.
Module Three – Win-Win Negotiations, introduces techniques for making sure that both Atos and their clients end up with a solution that is right for them and adds real value.
The workshops were designed to be innovative and highly interactive and include use of actors, role plays, real-life situations and video
The Result
The programme has become a sought-after development opportunity. Feedback from the workshops has been consistently excellent and a recent independent Return on Investment study carried out by Atos Consulting has concluded that there has been significant new business (well over £1 million) as a direct result of the programme.
