Goal worth achieving:

Define new innovative services, define success, and uncover the unknowns that would stand in the way or slow the success of this growth opportunity.

The Client Request

Market their new innovative service

Discovery Phase

Integrating services that were previously stand-alone offerings inherently challenges the status quo—with internal stakeholders as well as with buyers.

CROs were not known to offer these services.

Internally, the new innovative services were not understood.

There were many hidden costs that were not understood because of the current way the industry was doing business.

Because it was new and not understood, customers did not care about these services.

With both services separated (not combined), the market was competing with the same capabilities and range of services.

Because they were new to this space, credibility needed to be established.

Combining these services could make the basic bid appear higher because it was combining services that were at different phases of the bid proposal process.

There were many unknowns. How could they understand what they did not know or could not see?

Employees in the company operated in separate business units. How do they work across silos when the business structure did not support that?

Who needed to be engaged in the work and how should they be engaged?

Identify the leadership team and key employees that would add value and knowledge from different points of view in this work.

Major
Take-Away

In order to achieve the growth the executives wanted, the leadership and employees needed to define the new offer and its value to customers before moving to marketing.

Nine Lenses of Organizational Clarity

Working with a leadership team and key employees, together we chose the single most burning question they needed to answer for success: “How do we differentiate ‘the company’ with ‘Service A’ and ‘Service B’ combined?”

  • We conducted a two-day offsite retreat with the leadership team and key employees from all levels where we ran the burning question through each of the 9 lenses of organizational clarity.
  • Gained a 360-degree picture of what needs to be addressed to achieve the burning question.
  • Created a detailed situation analysis of what they have, what they know, what they needed.




  • Gained a clear understanding of who needs to be involved in the work for success—people and relationships, current promoters, and key issues and challenges.
  • Created a detailed list of systems that needed to be addressed and what is needed for: training, process, measurement.
  • Gained a clear understanding of the level of difficulty (easy to hard) for each initiative chosen.
  • Gained a clear understanding of the length of time it will take (long to short) to achieve each initiative.
  • Created a clear common path forward for the work that needed to be done.
  • Developed a baseline understanding for marketing and selling needs.
  • Assigned ownership for each initiative.
  • Aligned expectations.
  • Identified top three goals.
  • Listed current and future services and capabilities of new services.

Back to Discovering Organizational Value