Building The Business Case For Growth Investment

A Better Formula For Funding and Executing Commercial Transformation

Kristen Carloni leads the global Business Proposal Strategy team for Aladdin Sales and Marketing, a B2B technology business within BlackRock. Her responsibilities center around ensuring an impactful and scalable business proposal process for selling the firm’s financial technology products. From that perch, her team directly impacts the majority of revenues in the business. “The most important, biggest deals come through my team,” says Carloni. “So as a baseline if we don’t do our job the firm is never going to see that revenue, it’s just going to die on the vine.”

While Business Proposal Strategy conveys the workings of her job, Kristen’s role defies conventional description. In practice she works across marketing, product, IT and sales functions to leverage technology and AI in ways that help her firm drive faster, more profitable and scalable growth. In other words, she’s a poster child for what is emerging as the next generation of growth leader, a Revenue Operations executive. The description is apt because Kristen is working across silos to better connect teams, data, technology and processes to:

1. Generate more consistent, reliable and profitable revenue growth

2. Improve the return on growth investments in sales, marketing and customer programs

3. Maximize the return on commercial assets like brand, channels, innovation and knowledge assets

She’s doing this with a small team of under a dozen people who are impacting over 90 percent of the revenues in the business. At the same time she’s helping the people responsible for the rest of the revenue be more effective in their jobs. And she’s in the best position, most importantly, to leverage AI multiplier to drive more scalable revenue growth. A big reason she is so effective is she has adopted the principles and platforms of Strategic Response Management (SRM) which is defined as the people, practice and technology to unlock organizational knowledge for profit growth.

Every sales operations, marketing operations, or sales enablement executive can learn a lot from Kristen about creating, quantifying, and communicating the financial impact commercial transformation can have on the business. Why? Because she’s used the principles of Revenue Operations to effectively unlock more of the full potential of the growth investments and assets of her business. And she’s done it from what seems on the surface as a relatively back office “cost center” stuck in the middle of the revenue cycle – the bid and proposal response team.

A BETTER BUSINESS CASE FOR COMMERCIAL TRANSFORMATION

Generating more consistent and profitable revenue – Unlike typical sales and marketing operations teams, Kristen’s team has the advantage of directly impacting top line revenues. That makes a big difference when it comes to leading commercial transformation in the eyes of leadership. The average B2B response team directly impacts almost one half (48%) of revenues in terms of both customer acquisition (via RFPs) and loyalty and expansion (via Due Diligence Questionnaires) according to APMP benchmarks. They also drive additional revenue by providing market intelligence, self-service knowledgebases, customer insight, and knowledge assets that help improve the overall go-to-market process. As evidence, Carloni’s team has leveraged technology to grow the percent of revenues they directly impact from 70% to 92% of revenues in the past year – with greater productivity, performance and at lower cost. They’ve effectively used the insights and experience drawn from responding to hundreds of customers to inform and improve the efforts of the product, marketing, finance, and sales teams in many ways. Calculating the Probability of winning. Showing where to allocate resources. Identifying the top features customers want. Forecasting future demand 24 months out. Reporting which marketing messages are landing or not. And more. Here are some examples:

1. Maximizing selling capacity and bandwidth – “About five years ago, we acquired a new proposal technology and that really started the process that moved me and our response team from back office individual contributors to a more strategic growth center for the business,” says Carloni. “I basically took a bet and I said look, with this (SRM) technology, and the data, efficiencies, and insights it generates, I think that we can take on a much larger proposal and opportunity workload and not hire a single person. My boss trusted me to do that, and a year later, I was able to show him that we doubled our volumes, we doubled our revenue impact, and we didn’t have to hire a single person.”
2. Improving seller productivity through time savings –“Our investment in an AI enabled content database saved so much SME (subject matter expert) and sales time it paid off in less than three months on that dimension alone,” says Carloni. “I feel like we can actually put a monetary value on the database we have created because in the last year our content has been used over 10,000 times by hundreds of subject matter experts and sellers and at ten minutes saved per response. That comes to thousands of hours saved by those expensive assets and resources.” Carloni is not alone in this perspective. Eighty four percent of peer organizations surveyed have invested in self-service solutions that provide hundreds of front line sellers access to the knowledge, content and compliant answers in the knowledgebases to quickly, accurately. For example, leaders like Microsoft track “field hours saved” as a core KPI for their response teams. Kristen’s peer Carrie Jordan, who developed Microsoft’s Proposal Center of Excellence reports saving the 17,000 front line reps with access to their system hundreds of hours every year (or 20 minutes to respond to unique questions). “At Microsoft, our investment in an AI powered SRM platform has been crucial in managing the rapid growth of our proposal volume by providing a scalable solution that gives our expanding team streamlined access to a centralized knowledge base, allowing field teams to quickly find vetted, approved answers,” says Carrie Jordan, the Global Director of Proposals serving Microsoft’s Proposal Center of Excellence.
3. Improving conversion rate and probability of winning – Not only did the Strategic Response Management system improve productivity by liberating hundreds of hours of time for Carloni’s response team, but it also improved their performance. “We measure win rate as a core metric, and 95% of the deals we manage advance to the next phase of the process,” says Carloni. This type of performance is not unprecedented for organizations that are using data and analytics from response systems to improve processes and increase conversion rates. For example, 80% of market leading organizations (with over 60% win rates) apply strategic response data to improve yields according to the APMP SRM Survey. “The data shows that companies that invest more in Strategic Response Management win more,” says Danelle Morrow, a peer who leads North America Creative Services and Proposal Development Center at Sodexo. Morrow’s team generated a 3,000 percent Return on their investment in automating the bid and proposal process in 2024.

Improving the return on growth investment. As compelling as these returns are, many sales leaders make the mistake of treating sales productivity as a single solution problem, according to Bob Kelly, the CEO of the Sales Management Association. Instead Kelly advises managers to treat commercial transformation as an equilibrium problem that involves constantly balancing some fundamental tradeoffs such as investing in salesperson up-skilling versus simplifying the selling job; undergoing wholesale transformation versus pursuing incremental process improvements. Kristen Carloni has struck that balance in her efforts to transform the commercial model one dollar at a time at Blackrock. “Our ability to impact sales win rates, productivity, capacity and costs is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the financial impact we’ve delivered when you compare it to the multiplier effect it has had on the return we are getting from our selling assets, IP, and investments,” says Carloni. Academic research reinforces Carloni’s focus on maximizing the return on commercial investments at lower risk. Business leaders that understand the math of growth in a modern business realize that far greater financial impact can be had by managing the allocation and deployment of growth resources, investments and assets such as building customer and brand equity, while mitigating the risks associated with selling.

1. Resource allocation – “Another big way we are creating value is by answering the question: are we spending our time in the right places?” says Carloni. Getting this answer right is important because optimally aligning account priorities, coverage, engagement model, roles and territory assignments with opportunity can improve performance 50% and add 5-10 points of profit contribution, according to the Revenue Operations Benchmark Report. “What’s really most important is to use our knowledge to identify what deals not to chase, and use our AI to reduce the unproductive time spend chasing good deals because sales is our biggest expense,” says Carloni. “When we can reallocate where salespeople spend their effort to better opportunities and automate the process to respond directly to customer questions we really multiply the returns on our investments.”
2. Sales rep ramp and retention – Another way Carloni’s team is creating value is by simplifying and enabling the seller experience. These are key factors in ramping and retaining front line selling talent which in turn have a large impact on selling costs and revenues. So using AI to improve user satisfaction and the seller experience will allow you to help salespeople to reach their full potential. “I’m excited about the new generation of talent coming in and the ways they are leveraging AI to ramp up and contribute quickly to the business,” says Carloni. “Historically, it has taken six months for a front line seller to be conversational in our business. Eighteen months to really be good. We recently had a fellow who joined us using our AI to hit the ground running and make an impact in two weeks.”
3. Customer experience – “Another big area we are increasing our impact is the quality of our responses and customer experience” says Carloni. “Specifically we are leveraging the growing number of images and videos our marketing teams are creating in our responses instead of just word and PowerPoints.” Speed is also emerging as a bigger CX driver as almost half (46%) of Kristen’s peers report feeling more pressure to respond faster from buyers according to the APMP study. “One of the biggest ways AI can have an impact on revenues and the customer experience is to increase the speed of response by breaking down silos across the marketing, product, engineering and sales teams that must work together to respond to customer inquiries,” says Carloni.
4. Quality and risk management – The business risks associated with proposals, surveys and customer responses – in terms of brand safety, regulatory compliance, customer experience and delays – are a hidden and growing factor in the modern commercial model as more and more B2B and B2B2C revenues are coming directly from bids, assessments, and inquiries. Sixty four percent of response professionals see an increase in business risk associated with responding to customers formally (via RFP, DDQ) and informally when sales reps answer non proposal questions or customers get answers from chatbots. “Our systems , processes and knowledgebase have allowed us a degree of control by establishing a common, credible and compliant language for communicating with customers,” says Carloni. “As an example, our marketing team is now using our content library as the baseline to ensure their creative, messaging and content is on message and in compliance.”

Maximizing the return on commercial assets. Perhaps the biggest financial impact a commercial transformation leader like Carloni can have is to unlock the enormous untapped growth potential of the firms commercial assets. Why? Because the majority of the value in firms is intangible commercial assets – including market-based assets, knowledge assets, computerized information, innovative property, and economic competencies like ‘sales know how.’ When properly measured and accounted for, these intangible assets can represent up to 80% or more of the value of a business.

1. Knowledge and “Know How” – “One of the biggest contributions my team makes is to create a robust centralized database of all our selling content and compliance approved answers that we can make available to 600 sales reps and we have an AI that can answer their questions in real time,” says Carloni. This makes financial sense because 80% of firm value is attributed to “intangible assets” like the IP, computerized information, and go to market ‘know how’ that live in the knowledgebase. These knowledge assets include the selling methods, selling skills, product knowledge, market knowledge and industry experience every CRO invests in. Smart managers like Carloni are using Strategic Response Management (SRM) platforms to actively consolidate these knowledge assets in ways that can help every selling rep, channel and partner better respond to customers – whether it’s a simple question or a full blown RFP response. This effectively makes the response team the curator of a large portion of the balance sheet assets of the company.
2. Information and data – “Our systems capture so much more go-to-market data than we could possibly manage with excel or word,” says Carloni. “This effectively democratizes the commercial information in our business and puts it at the fingertips of analysts who can then dig deeper (and faster) into the performance of our entire GTM system. This allows our entire revenue team to drill down into important questions about the performance of our entire go-to-market – what is happening?, where in the process is it breaking down?, what is likely to happen next?, and is the problem something we can fix?” Over 80% of leading organizations are actively using the data and analytics from response systems to improve processes and increase win rates and inform their go to market strategies.
3. Artificial Intelligence – “Don’t sleep on the potential of AI in selling,” advises Carloni. “You don’t want to be the ‘Blockbuster’ of your company – lean in, be curious, be proactive and set high expectations for the financial impact AI can have. It’s also a great way to ‘future proof’ your career.” Like 89% of her peers, Carloni’s team is actively experimenting with ways they can use AI to automate the work of finding, assembling or creating content and improving the quality, compliance and consistency of selling proposals. “The AI allows us to scale our impact by opening out our knowledge to hundreds of salespeople rather than just our small response team,” says Carloni. “We are using AI to systematically capture, organize and create content,” she adds. “Your selling content is like running water – you cannot let content get stale. You need to keep it current and in compliance.” But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps the biggest value Carloni’s team adds to the business is helping to train, deploy and scale AI in commercial applications. The reason is that SRM provides the two essential ingredients to successfully deploying and profitably scaling AI. The first is a high quality proprietary learning data set essential to training AI. The second is a strong business case for funding AI that is tied to revenue and the customer experience. As businesses struggle with hallucinations and unreliability of internet data and the costs of third party data, SRM provides a unique, proprietary training data set that is valuable to your customers.