The Challenge

Mobily had moved into the B2B market after five as the 2nd Telco Operator in Saudi’s recently deregulated market. Mobily had to challenge the incumbent Telco and rapidly increase their B2B market share using their internal resources including corporately diverse teams from very different cultures and from 15 different countries.

I was asked to join a Consulting team to design a strategy to transform the B2B sales within Mobily. There was also involved 2 of the Big 4 Consulting firms,, advising on sub-projects, who also needed to be integrated into the strategy. This led to concerns about the potential conflicts between consultant agendas. Therefore managing the third party suppliers effectively was a key challenge that needed to be addressed to assure programme success.

We assessed all of the projects and programmes in-progress or planned and we researched where each one may have impacted on the B2B Strategy as a whole. We uncovered several operational issues where projects had become “stuck” because the commitment to the change was lacking. We decided we needed to be creative…

The Solutions

We supported the Chief Business Officer (CBO) in presenting a holistic strategy to the Board that defined the end-to-end process for purchasing every product and service and where we could change the processes to alleviate the bottlenecks. We engaged with all departmental staff in understanding their challenges and getting their buy-in to give them ownership. We all began to enjoy the change process!

Some changes were relatively simple. Others were challenging or overly-complex because seemingly unrelated processes had a major impact on Sales. The areas that we covered were diverse:

• Reducing the Engineering Division delivery of new fixed lines from 45 days to 12 days.
• Simplifying the customer billing system so Customers could understand their bills.
• Giving targets and accountability to the Customer Experience teams so that Customer Service became far more important.
• Aligning Technical, Marketing and Administrative staff with Regional Enterprise and Key Account Sales teams so that internal problems became owned.
• Undertaking deep Competitor Analysis and matching their Customer Sales Teams to win major business.
• Restructuring the B2B Sales and Marketing departments to support each other.
• Redesigning the entire Sales Account Management and Bid Management processes to enable the flexibility to win business.
• Provided a Training and Education Programme for all Sales staff to understand Relationship and Strategic Sales techniques.
• Creating a PC-based Dashboard for ALL teams (including senior managers) to view real-time progress on deals and delivery.

The Outcomes

B2B Sales increased 300% year-on-year and motivation and inter-departmental collaboration increased exponentially. The implementation of the strategy framework allowed Mobily to take a 35% B2B market share in their third year in the B2B space. We had our contract extended to ensure the strategy could be adapted as the business changed. The programme had many challenges… and, during a difficult economic time, we made a lasting corporate-culture transformation and we had the opportunity to work with great people.