A value creation approach to increasing sales efficiency drives 25% revenue growth

Our Impact 

A consumer eyewear company needed to improve growth and efficiency. But increased sales costs and an inconsistent customer experience were inhibiting their growth potential. That’s when they called West Monroe.  

We saw an opportunity to drive profitable and predictable growth by harnessing data to align and enable their revenue growth management (RGM) strategy and improve the customer experience. We understood this would involve more than incremental changes. It would require building a true digital mindset through a combination of strategy, technology, data and analytics, and organizational change. 

Our client knew we would deliver a solution with tangible impact—just as we had in previous projects with them. The company began to see measurable increases in both revenue and efficiency in just months. 

The Full Story 

The Challenge

The centralized sales organization for optical frames and lenses was newly formed to consolidate historically fragmented sales organizations across various frame brands and lenses. They wanted to sell more efficiently—in particular, generating more revenue from existing accounts to free up time for sales representatives to acquire new accounts. This would require some significant changes. 

One area of concern? Customer experience. The multiple sales groups devoted to optical frames and lenses each represented specific brands and employed different sales approaches—but all touched the same accounts and customers. This created inefficiencies in the sales process and caused confusion for customers.  

Another key was the alignment of service levels with eyecare providers’ needs and the total potential account value. With many tenured sales professionals, the organization often relied on established approaches and beliefs rather than insights derived from current data. For example, one sales group continued to emphasize face-to-face contact, without considering how the pandemic changed eyecare providers’ preferences. And many believed that the more customer touchpoints, the larger the sales.  

Sales leaders wanted a new framework for guiding sales strategy—that was grounded in data—as well as support for changing established ways of working. That’s where we came in. 

An Undeniably Different Approach

Our multidisciplinary team of customer experience, consumer products, and technology experts came ready to help our client adopt an RGM mindset and begin building the capabilities to enable it.  

The foundation for RGM is data, so that’s where we dug in. We gathered and analyzed data to diagnose issues and were able to present action-ready recommendations—in areas ranging from client segmentation to organization design—in just weeks.  

We first harvested multiple years of our client’s sales data and external data sources—including client demographics, trade area population, current and prospective eyecare locations, and population densities for each eyecare retail location—to test common beliefs and hypotheses around the company’s sales processes. We also analyzed sales representatives according to accounts serviced, brands carried, and the respective correlations to sales performance.

Finally, we leveraged account purchasing history to develop a framework for aligning sales activity with client segments based on current sales, account penetration, growth potential, and external market factors. This helped our client determine the optimal way to service each account in the future—for example, high-touch service for large buyers or accounts with high growth potential, versus digitally enabled, lower-touch service for accounts with less growth potential. This exercise aligned each of the company’s 10,000+ accounts with an appropriate sales/service model. It also allowed us to define the optimal number of sales representatives required in each region.

Because our recommendations were grounded in thorough analysis, sales leaders quickly embraced them and began taking action right away. 

Real Results

Our client is now on its way toward an established RGM model and a true digital, data-driven sales mindset. The entire sales organization for optical frames and lenses now runs based on data and insight rather than hypotheses—making it more responsive to customer needs and preferences. As a result, the organization has both increased sales efficiency and revenue. Revenue from existing accounts is estimated to grow by more than 25% with a 20% smaller sales force.