Ronald Gruben

Senior Principal

Focus Improving effectiveness and efficiency of commercial organizations by designing, implementing and optimizing business processes and management reports, including the necessary tooling (CRM).
Expertise (Re)design of marketing and sales processes, management reporting, CRM implementations, customer research, identifying customer buying motives and translate them into practical sales strategies.
Markets IT, banking, insurance and business services.
Motto ‘In change everything revolves around the mental implementation.’

Motive for Ronald is successfully contributing to increase the commercial power of customers, by developing and implementing business processes and the effective use of supporting tools (CRM).

Experience

• Implementation of accurate and timely sales management reporting

An internationally active, publicly listed telecom and network provider had insufficient insight into the development of its current and future sales and profits (‘funnel’ and ‘forecast’). Moreover there was a lack of background information to explain and limit any deviations such as unambiguous use of sales stages in the pipeline, breakdown of turnover by product and delta reports with previous periods. The sales organization was equipped with a CRM system (Siebel). Together with the management Ronald firstly searched for the causes of the abnormal forecast and stimulated the implementation of CRM in the sales organization in five countries based on clear definition and processing as ‘new business’, ‘existing business’, ‘outlook’, and ‘commit’. By convincing the sales organization about the usefulness and necessity of CRM training to be assembled and provided, and actively support and monitor the use of CRM, a high level of adoption was achieved. The organization now works with accurate and timely management information, based on objective data from the field (account management). This has led to improved management decisions on the classification of opportunities, assigning resources and budget to promising opportunities, as well as a significant time savings of three hours per week per employee, on average, for internal consultation.

•    Improving commercial performance in bank branches

A publicly listed financial institution saw a widely varying performance in different branches. Together with the management of the branch network, Ronald discovered the underlying causes of the underperformance of some branch offices, with the help of customer interviews, customer panels and employee interviews. Together with the management Ronald then developed a strategy to improve the performance of these branch offices, notably by implementing process improvements, introduction of qualification of sales opportunities and training of sales staff. The result of this strategy implementation was a significant improvement in both the level and quality of the sales of the offices that were lagging behind: more revenue from existing customers by cross-selling, a higher hit rate on sales calls, and better utilization of the sales strength by focusing on promising customers.

• Implementing a unified sales process

A multinational company in the service field to the insurance industry had insufficient control over how its sales worked: sales departments used different processes for determining the forecast and sales pipeline. The sales estimates ranged from very conservative (almost always very low chances of success, even though the offer was already verbally accepted) to progressive (high chances of success after an initial exploratory meeting with a prospect). This had a negative impact on the prediction accuracy of the order intake over the coming periods. [/twocol_one][twocol_one_last]Ronald used targeted workshops and training to implement a uniform way of working between departments, based on common definitions and qualification opportunities. This approach was designed to enable departments to keep working largely in their own way. Part of this project was the implementation of Salesforce.com to secure the new, uniform way of working and to support the sales organization to effectively perform its functions and achieve sales targets. This resulted in an accurate prediction of the order intake (less than 10% deviation) and a more effective deployment of staff and management resources. Results: less internal consultation (savings of an average of 2 hours per week), less confusion, more time for the customer (on average 2 more appointments per account/week/manager than before).

• Improving performance on customer expectations

An internationally operating, publicly listed financial services company had known an explosive growth in a new market for supplementary pensions. After a period of strong focus on getting new customers, the management was eager to investigate whether this growth was accompanied by meeting or even exceeding the expectations of the customer. To answer this question, Ronald formulated and implemented an approach for revealing customer expectations through interviews, mapping the knowledge thereof among employees and analysing the processes and systems used by the sales and delivery organization to realize the expectations of our customers. The outcome was a pragmatic plan to achieve and surpass customer expectations. Part of the plan were improved processes (in mail routing, e-mail traffic, termination of old policies, value transfer to a new pension plan) and improved customer communications (informing on the progress of value transfer, opportunities to save money or make investments, etc.). During one year, the improvements were implemented independently by the financial services provider. Thereafter a repeat survey was conducted by Ronald and revealed an increase of over 30% in the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is a clear indicator of customer satisfaction and repeat business potential.

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Ronald Gruben
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