Enterprise Redesign

Organized for Activity, Not Return

Rebuilding a sales organization around the accounts that drove the P&L — inside a large country business.

The Situation

I was brought in to fix a country sales P&L running below plan and losing margin, on a six-month mandate to restore contribution per rep — cost held flat, revenue and margin floors intact. The market was growing; the business wasn't capturing its share. Contribution per rep had collapsed on both revenue and margin. And the organization was doing everything its structure asked of it: high activity, healthy pipeline, reps hitting their motions. On the surface it read as a performance problem. It wasn't.

What Had Actually Changed

The organization had been built around geography when the type of account had become what drove the economics. Territory-led planning spread effort evenly across accounts that needed entirely different things — retention, acquisition, or development — so the work was busy and the return was thin. There was a second trap underneath it: no one trusted the numbers, so any reorg would have read as one more change against a baseline no one believed.

The Rebuild

So the order was the whole point. First I rebuilt forecast credibility — rightsizing the commitment to a number the data could defend (down before up, the hardest call to make under revenue pressure), publishing commit-versus-achievement across the organization, and pulling finance and category into a weekly rhythm. Cross-functional governance built during the credibility phase is the instrument the structural phase runs on. Only then did I rebuild the structure: planning shifted from territory to account profile, regions were consolidated and overlapping technical layers absorbed back into sales to fund it inside the flat envelope, and roles were anchored to what each account actually needed.

The Outcome

Forecast accuracy moved from 80% to above 90% and held — the business became plannable, and only then did the real problem become fixable. Contribution per rep recovered inside the mandate window, on a flat cost base. The successor inherited an operating substrate that could absorb the next strategic load, not a turnaround that needed defending.

Kept short on purpose. The longer version holds the harder part — the tensions, the trade-offs, and what fought back. Where it maps to something you're facing, I'll share the full account or walk you through it.