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Succession Planning

Creating Competitive Advantage by Investing in Young Managers

David Austin

The business processes outsourcing market is highly competitive. In recent years, the types of services these firms offer have increased dramatically. Some firms differentiate themselves by the size and scale of their operation, some on price and others by providing tightly integrated vertical offerings. PointClear, a firm that provides sales opportunity management for technology companies, distinguishes itself by the quality of its hires and the training delivered to ensure precise execution of business methodologies. It’s a success formula that has taken years to develop and perfect.

PointClear works with companies such as Capgemini, Dun & Bradstreet, Iron Mountain and UPS to help provide business intelligence and qualified business opportunities in support of clients’ sales forces. Unlike many business process outsourcing vendors, who focus on lower-value tasks, PointClear’s efforts inexorably are linked to its clients’ ability to grow revenue in their businesses. So, hiring the right type of employee to interact with these companies and manage these complex programs is essential to the company’s success.

“We go through a rigorous hiring process to find the right type of manager — one that comes with experience and, more important, demonstrates the ability to learn and adapt to our way of doing business,” PointClear President Dan McDade said. “Like most companies, we place a lot of emphasis on our unique way of doing things — our proprietary processes. So training and making managers productive quickly is important to our business operations, and retaining these high-value employees is essential.”

A company’s ability to do the right things and do them well often is what provides a distinct competitive advantage. And although it’s difficult to place a hard value on know-how, most people can identify companies that fit this type of profile. Typically, they are highly responsive to client needs, innovative, best in class and often command client and employee loyalty — an unusual characteristic in an increasingly fickle marketplace.

But even these companies face risk of poor execution, McDade said.

“The more we can communicate the details of how we run the business to our managers, the more they appreciate the trust we put in them,” he said. “It’s also more likely they’ll understand the corporate strategy and embrace our company as their employer of choice. It’s a highly competitive market for young talent. Beyond providing good salary and benefits, we look at other ways to build loyalty and commitment with our people.”

To provide employees with a more-detailed view into the business, PointClear selected Contextware’s knowledge and learning platform to help codify its unique and proprietary business practices into a Web-based operating environment. Employees can access the environment in real time for learning and offering feedback for continual improvement.

“We had invested more than 10 years toward perfecting our sales opportunity management framework,” McDade said. “We couldn’t risk losing all of the knowledge we had accumulated, nor could we suffer from poor execution as the organization continued to grow. This approach allows us to communicate our business to employees at a much more detailed level while simultaneously meeting the needs of onboarding employees.”

Today, McDade’s employees are able to access a task-based portal as a reference and productivity tool that links together all the information they need to execute their jobs.

“What started as an initiative to provide better information support and training to our people evolved into a project that brings employees a lot closer to the business — an outcome that helps us retain the type of talent we need to maintain and grow the business successfully,” McDade said.