The Situation
Two major healthcare companies had the opportunity to secure leading positions across their markets through a strategic merger. However, realizing the full benefits required integrating their distinct sales approaches into a unified, high-performing model. Adding to the complexity, management set an ambitious timeline to achieve synergies and meet financial targets—all while ensuring minimal disruption to the combined customer base.
Our Approach
Finovate partnered with the company to design a future-ready salesforce, implementing a new reporting structure and an optimized balance of generalists and specialists. The goal was to maximize synergies while minimizing customer impact. This collaborative effort involved several key steps:
Identify the Current State
Identify the current state of the salesforce at each company, including headcount, organization structure, products sold, territories and customers covered, and compensation design.
Design the Future-State Salesforce
Design the future-state salesforce and analytically pressure-test the resulting changes to the customers, territories, and products covered to ensure a smooth transition.
Manage an Implementation Program
Launch and manage an implementation program in the first year to deliver synergies on an ambitious timeline. This includes migrating to a new organizational structure and a new set of roles and responsibilities, communicating clearly to key stakeholders and identifying quick wins.
The Results
Customer orders remained steady during the sales transition, and financial performance in the impacted business units exceeded internal forecasts.
Sales representatives were shifted toward the future-state, guided by the new organization structure, territories, product coverage, and compensation design in both North America and Europe.
The combined company was also on track toward full integration of sales enablement tools, including revised training programs, rationalized sales IT systems and updated sales dashboards and performance metrics.
Identified net synergies for the third year expected to exceed expectations at 1.5 times the initial target.
Guide the Process and Solve Problems
A weekly, executive-level decision mechanism to guide the process and solve problems as they arise.
“We wouldn’t have gotten to where we are today without Finovate. The Finovate spent time with us to better understand our processes and where our bottlenecks were.”
I appreciate the focus on helping regional banks specifically. Often, the advice out there is geared towards larger institutions and doesn’t address the specific constraints and opportunities that regional banks face. I think exploring strategies like M&A to achieve operational scale and offset regulatory compliance costs is critical for these banks1. Also, as mentioned in another article, developing or expanding niche capabilities to open up new opportunities could be a game-changer.