Adroit Consulting | A Better Approach to Global Growth Initiatives

Newsletter: A Better Approach to Global Growth Initiatives

Global initiatives have the added complexity of having to address cultural and operational differences across the enterprise. Launching such initiatives is often fraught with internal challenges and skepticism.

As companies have sought growth on a global basis, and looked to streamline and improve their customer facing operations, many have sought to develop standard approaches that can be deployed anywhere in the world, especially as an increasing share of their revenues are coming from international customers. But customer facing operations typically involve large numbers of moving pieces and costs such as staff, technology and interconnected processes. Regions often overstate their differences and uniqueness and create a perception and "self belief" within the enterprise that standardized approaches will not work in their part of the world. As a result, many companies delay or sub-optimize operational improvement by allowing each region to develop a unique, non-scalable approach and then attempt to collaborate with other regional organizations. A process fought with frustration. Alternatively they spent countless unproductive hours/weeks/months developing and testing new processes that pass muster with each individual region. Equally frustrating and costly.

There is a better way, though, to deploy operational improvement on a global basis and overcome the internal skepticism that has confounded such approaches in the past: Blueprinting and Global Refinement (BAGR). Under this approach, companies use a collaborative approach among disparate regions to develop an initial operational blueprint which can consist of new processes, tool requirements, roles, or any other element to address the underlying operational challenge. In the Blueprinting Phase, regions vet their differences and develop an approach that is consistent enough to be scalable, yet nuanced enough to address the unique needs of each local market. The Global Refinement Phase is then used to present the blueprint to regions that did not participate in the Blueprinting Phase and provide the opportunity to make minor tweaks to address their local concerns. The Global Refinement Phase can happen quickly as each region has a blueprint that they can react to and a forum to provide direct feedback. This iterative approach is far superior to working from a "clean whiteboard" by region or any of the alternative approaches historically utilized.

The beauty of the BAGR approach is in the speed in which it can be deployed (by focusing on a small set of global resources to develop the blueprint) and the high level of adoption that can be achieved during implementation. In this approach, companies receive additional benefits of identifying best practices across the globe and increasing collaboration between regional resources.

BAGR Case Study: Global Sales Process
A major capital equipment company recently deployed a global sales effectiveness initiative to improve its sales operations across the globe. As the company operates on 5 continents in 17 disparate regions, it knew that deployment of the initiative would meet cultural and business resistance in some markets. In order to combat this resistance, it deployed the BAGR approach to developing the new sales process.

Two regions were selected to participate in the Blueprinting exercise. Representatives from these regions were interviewed to provide feedback and observed to understand how the region operates and understand individual nuances. They then participated in a series of workshops to develop a new sales process that would be effective for each of their markets. The workshop included cross-functional and cross-regional teams working on different pieces of the process with teams required to work out their differences and align on a scalable, flexible approach. Adroit Consulting facilitated and designed the workshops, and synthesized the results into a sales process blueprint. This blueprint was then presented in a series of Global Refinement Workshops to the remaining 15 regions that had an opportunity to "tweak" the process further. The tweaks were relatively minor as the global input provided in the Blueprinting phase already addressed many local nuances.

This company found that the BAGR approach not only resulted in a scalable, effective process, but also created Concept Champions throughout the globe that were supportive of the new process and acted as local leaders in their individual regions. The complete global process was designed and refined in 3 months resulting in a rapid deployment with dramatically reduced resistance.