Revenue Transformation | B2B Industrial

Anonymized case study. Key data points have been adjusted to preserve confidentiality.

The context: a mid-market industrial company in transition

B2B industrial group, 200 employees, 5 business units, €35M in revenue. Each BU was built or acquired independently: its own sales reps, its own tools, its own methods, its own sales culture. The CEO wants to unify without standardizing. The goal isn't to impose a single model, but to create a common foundation that allows the 5 BUs to be steered, compared, and optimized using the same framework.

The diagnostic was commissioned to establish an objective baseline before launching the transformation, drawing on our 515-standard methodology.

The complexity

5 BUs means 5 different CRMs (2 on Excel, 1 on Salesforce, 1 on Pipedrive, 1 on an in-house ERP), 5 sales methodologies, 5 ways of defining what a "qualified lead" is, and 38 sales reps who have never shared a single practice with each other.

But this complexity also hides a massive opportunity. Shared customers across BUs that are never identified. Sales skills in one BU that could benefit the other 4. Cross-BU cross-sell potential that has never been explored, simply because no one has the cross-functional view.

"5 BUs, 38 sales reps, no shared process. The diagnostic laid the foundations of our transformation." · Group CEO

What the diagnostic revealed

Revenue Health Score: 29/100: Critical

No pillar above 50. The 3 most structural gaps:

• RevOps (12/100): Cross-functional data, tools, and processes have no dedicated owner. Each BU is a complete silo. No consolidated reporting: the CEO receives 5 monthly reports in 5 different formats, which he manually compiles into an Excel sheet to get a group-level view. No shared definition of sales stages, performance metrics, or qualification criteria. Even the notion of "pipeline" doesn't mean the same thing from one BU to another.

• CRM (15/100): 2 BUs run on Excel, meaning zero traceability of customer interactions, zero usable history, and zero forecasting capability. The other 3 BUs have underused CRMs: the tools are in place but the data is incomplete, processes aren't followed, and no one has been trained to use the CRM as a steering tool rather than a digital address book. The potential for adoption and configuration is considerable.

• Management (25/100): No cross-functional sales rituals. No consolidated forecast. Reporting is monthly, delivered 2 to 3 weeks late, and based on data that is neither reliable nor comparable across BUs. Sales decisions are made independently by each BU director, without coordination or the sharing of best practices. The CEO lacks the data to arbitrate investment priorities across BUs.

The transformation plan

Phase 1: Foundations (Months 1-3)

• A single CRM deployed and configured for all 5 BUs, with a shared data model that respects each BU's specifics (BU-specific custom fields, pipeline stages adapted to each business's sales cycle)
• Migration of historical data from the 5 existing sources (Excel, Salesforce, Pipedrive, ERP) into the single CRM
• Weekly Revenue Review established at group level, with a standardized format and a consolidated dashboard

Phase 2: Method (Months 4-6)

• Sales methodology deployed (MEDDIC adapted to long industrial sales cycles, with specific stages for tenders and multi-stakeholder projects)
• Bi-weekly coaching for the 38 sales reps, in groups of 6 to 8, mixed across BUs to encourage the sharing of practices
• Formalized SLAs between BUs for multi-product accounts: who owns the account, how the relationship is shared, how cross-sell is compensated

Phase 3: Intelligence (Months 7-12)

• Consolidated dashboards by BU and at group level, with shared KPIs (pipeline, win rate, sales cycle, forecast accuracy) and BU-specific KPIs
• Cross-BU lead scoring: automatic identification of customers in one BU who are prospects for another
• Formalized cross-BU expansion process with an opportunity-detection playbook, an internal referral process, and tracking of cross-BU revenue

The results after 18 months

The €2.1M in cross-BU cross-sell alone represents a figure that simply didn't exist before the transformation. This revenue was generated with zero acquisition investment: these are existing customers of one BU who bought products from another BU, thanks to the cross-functional visibility created by the unified CRM and the cross-opportunity detection process.

Next step

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