Commercial Strategy Design for Logistics Company, increasing performance by 90% in 6 Months

The subsidiary of a global logistics group operated a 16-person sales team across two branches. The team looked busy, with a full pipeline and heavy activity reporting, but the commercial reality was stark: the majority of salespeople were not covering their own cost to company, and parts of the sales function were effectively running at a loss.

Every salesperson operated as a generalist, chasing everything from global tenders to once-off courier shipments. Senior salespeople capable of opening strategic accounts spent their weeks administering low-value transactional business, while the highest-lifetime-value relationships in the book, the global tender accounts, were fragmented across multiple individuals with no coherent ownership.

The engagement had to resolve several structural and cultural issues at once:

• A generalist sales model in which no one could build genuine expertise in any single selling motion
• Senior selling capacity misallocated to low-value transactional administration
• Global tender accounts fragmented across the team, with no unified bid history or single point of accountability
• A reporting culture built on activity KPIs that measured motion rather than progress, and taught the team to optimise for looking busy

Rather than pushing harder on the existing structure with more pipeline reviews and more pressure, the assessment concluded that the structure itself was the constraint. The mandate was to redesign the sales organisation around three questions: whether the most expensive selling capacity was pointed at the highest-value problems, whether every account type had an owner suited to serving it, and whether the KPIs measured what the business needed rather than what was easy to count. On all three, the answer was no.

Cluster structure. The 16-person generalist team was split into three specialist clusters, each with its own mandate and definition of success: new business (hunters, measured on strategic account acquisition), key accounts (retention, penetration and share of wallet), and customer service (a dedicated home for transactional volume).

Account segmentation. Lower-value and transactional accounts were systematically moved out of the sales pipeline and into the customer service cluster, releasing hunter capacity while giving transactional accounts faster, more consistent service.

Global tender consolidation. All global tender accounts were consolidated under a single owner, converting fragmented relationships into one relationship strategy and one coherent tender history.

Culture change. The fear-based management style was dismantled and replaced with a collaborative model in which reps worked leads together, mistakes became data, and pipeline reporting no longer needed to disguise reality.

KPI reset. Activity KPIs that generated administration without informing commercial decisions were scrapped and replaced with a small set of measures with a direct, defensible line to revenue and gross profit.

• 100% of the team covering cost to company within six months, from a majority below cost at the start
• 90% of salespeople hitting or exceeding target
• New-business cluster Gross Profit up 92.5% quarter on quarter
• New account wins annuitising rather than landing as one-offs, with new signings generating repeat trade within 30 days