Growth strategies for A2B Global Media

Context

A2B Global Media publish a range of transport-focussed trade publications, primarily targeted at the rail industry but making growing inroads in bus and air travel. We engaged with A2B to try to galvanise and clear bottlenecks to rapid growth.

Our Process

At the start of this engagement, we spent a period of time in discussion with the A2B, building an understanding of their goals, the mechanics and performance of the company, and the external environment it operates within.  This established not just our known constraints and drivers, but also the areas of uncertainty.  The internal workings included revenues, customer numbers, sales efforts, operating costs, and the effectiveness of their administrative and technological support. We interrogated the external environment, too, to establish what was known of both current and potential customers, and the mechanisms used to reach them. 

The overall market size was large enough to support several years’ rapid growth. Existing sales were driven primarily by the outbound efforts of their sales team, offering two immediate avenues for short-term growth: through an increase in the size of the sales team, or improvements in per-salesperson sales.

Although recruitment for salespeople was clearly necessary in the medium- to long-term, it was also capital-intensive, less than completely reliable, and prone to lags in delivering sales. We also found, however, that sales in the short-term appeared to be hampered by the administrative burden. The admin team, who would ideally have alleviated it, were forced instead to battle with the technological shortcomings of a platform designed for an earlier stage in the company’s growth. All of this pointed to scalability issues that would severely limit further scale even with the benefit of a larger sales team (notwithstanding their undoubted abilities).

The software and technology operation was underpowered, the data structures were failing to provide the insight needed for salespeople to be able to target their efforts, and the sales team were, as a result, lacking coordination or a driving sense of purpose. It left the company’s leadership with a common problem, of feeling they lacked effective levers with which to influence their direction, causing frustration at leadership level and impacting morale more widely.

We chose in the short-term, therefore, to push hard on sales performance, through improvements in the structure, organisation and planning for the team itself and, significantly, in the nature of its administrative and technological support.

We worked with A2B on a small collection of precise measures aimed at increasing long-term capacity for growth but also, critically, delivering rapid short-term impact. The intention was to alter, decisively, the immediate financial climate to create room for longer-term planning and addressing the more far-sighted ambitions that had long been pushed aside. 

The first of these was to address the administrative sales burden with bolstered administrative support. This was easier to recruit for than sales, but also increased specialisation, reduced task-switching and helped individuals to focus, improving performance and morale across the board.

The second was to improve the planning processes for the technical team, providing them with fewer, more focussed goals, enabling greater responsiveness and giving them a clearer sense of purpose. This helped their morale, and enabled the leadership, too, to feel better about their efforts. Their goals were aligned strictly behind the immediate financial and operational goals, meaning their work could lead quickly to rapid improvements in sales and administration.

The third was that, with the administrative and technology improvements in place, it became possible to reconfigure the way sales efforts were organised to deliver better coordination and clearer leadership. This improved performance but also, again, gave a fuller sense of purpose to their work, improving morale and the sense of team spirit.

The Outcome

The decisive changes made during the engagement hugely improved or resolved many of the issues that prevailed at the start. As well as improving morale in the company and helping people to feel a stronger sense of purpose to their work, it has relieved the leadership of the sense of frustration they felt and enabled them to view their technical and sales efforts with positivity and a sense of excitement at the possibilities. This is a change which tends to propagate through companies, so is hard to overstate its importance. As we had hoped, by relieving the administrative obstacles, it has enabled growth in both the performance and size of the sales team, eliminating, at least for a time, the scaling issues that had previously constrained them.