CEO Experience
The examples below are drawn from engagements our CEO has completed. Together, they illustrate the experience and practical approach that shape how Point of View Consulting helps organisations understand business challenges, develop practical recommendations and deliver measurable business outcomes.
Aligning teams to improve profitability and customer outcomes
I was engaged to investigate why increasing sales volumes were not translating into improved profitability. My role was to identify the underlying causes, bring together the relevant business leaders, and develop practical recommendations that aligned commercial performance with customer success.
My Role
Executive leadership had identified a concerning trend. Although annual sales volumes continued to increase, gross profit remained largely unchanged. Sales believed they needed to reduce the scope of customer programmes to remain competitive, while other departments argued that this was creating significant downstream problems.
Context
I established a cross-functional working group consisting of Sales, Presales, Implementation and Customer Success. Before proposing solutions, we spent time understanding how each team experienced the sales process and where friction occurred. Rather than assigning blame, we focused on identifying root causes. We mapped the end-to-end sales process, documented every point of friction and worked collaboratively to understand how decisions made in one department affected the others. As the investigation progressed, it became clear that apparently unrelated issues were symptoms of the same underlying problems.
Investigation
What We Discovered
Several interconnected root causes emerged. Sales had become financially incentivised to minimise the scope of initial deals because upsells generated more favourable compensation. Although this was justified internally as being necessary for competitiveness, the investigation found little evidence that price was the real driver.
Because Sales retained ownership of the technical scope, Presales could recommend the appropriate solution but had no authority to prevent changes being made before contracts were signed. This created downstream implementation challenges, customer dissatisfaction and avoidable scope creep.
At the same time, the rapid expansion of the Presales organisation had resulted in many internal promotions. Although these individuals brought valuable product knowledge, formal training in technical discovery had not kept pace with growth.
Several recommendations affected commercial compensation and organisational incentives, requiring executive and board approval before implementation. To minimise disruption, new processes were introduced only for future opportunities while existing deals continued through the previous operating model until completion.
Constraints
Establish Presales as the owner of technical scope and solution specifications, while Sales retained responsibility for pricing and commercial negotiations.
Introduce structured handover documentation between Presales and Implementation, supported by standard templates and joint reviews for complex opportunities.
Give Customer Success formal authority over customer scope adjustments in an appropriate and commercially viable way.
Redesign compensation so Customer Success owned upsell targets, while Sales focused on acquiring new customers.
Introduce governance, approval thresholds and structured escalation for pricing and commercial decisions.
Strengthen Presales onboarding and discovery training to support rapid team growth.
Recommendations
The recommendations were implemented over the following months, with compensation changes phased in following executive and board approval. The relationship between Sales and Customer Success improved significantly as ownership and incentives became aligned, resulting in higher morale and better collaboration.
Presales and Implementation established a far more effective working relationship, reducing specification effort, shortening implementation cycles and reducing scope creep.
Average deal values increased by approximately 30%, rising from around $80,000 to more than $100,000, as Sales no longer had the incentive to compromise programme scope.
Customer satisfaction also improved significantly. Post-implementation satisfaction increased from the low 60% range to the mid-80% range, while one-year customer satisfaction improved from the mid-70% range to the low 90% range.
Results
Helping a global customer navigate a complex technology renewal
As leader of Solution Consulting, I assigned a senior consultant to lead the renewal while I joined the engagement as part of the executive leadership team. Given the strategic importance of the customer and the competitive nature of the renewal, my role was to work directly with senior client stakeholders, understand the underlying issues affecting the relationship, and coordinate the cross-functional response.
My Role
A strategic customer was approaching the renewal of their contract. Before the formal RFP process began, we organised a series of cross-functional workshops to understand how they viewed the relationship, the challenges they were experiencing, and what they wanted their programme to look like over the next three to five years. These discussions uncovered three significant concerns:
Marketing communications frequently promoted capabilities that were unavailable to them because they were still using an older technology platform.
The customer felt they were receiving inconsistent messages from different teams, with Customer Success often unaware of conversations that Sales had already had.
They were planning a significant redesign of their programme and were actively evaluating advanced capabilities being promoted by our competitors.
Context
Over several days we brought together representatives from Customer Success, Sales, Solution Consulting, Technical Support, Data Insights, senior management and the executive leadership team to explore the issues in detail. Following the client workshops, we conducted several internal investigations to validate the issues, identify the underlying causes and agree practical recommendations.
Investigation
What We Discovered
Rather than being isolated issues, the customer's concerns were all symptoms of broader organisational and operational problems. The reporting discrepancies were traced back to technical debt created during the original implementation three years earlier. Because engineering resources had been focused on delivering the live SaaS platform, the data analysis team had developed their own standalone reporting environment using manually refreshed data extracts. Over time, this created inconsistencies between live operational data and offline analysis.
Marketing had no reliable way of identifying which customers were using the legacy platform, resulting in inappropriate campaign messaging. We also discovered that Sales and Customer Success were often engaging the customer independently. Because Customer Success acted as the client's trusted advisor, differences between those conversations became highly visible and undermined confidence in the wider organisation.
Once the renewal entered the formal RFP process, communication with the customer would become significantly more restricted through purchasing. Any investigation, alignment and planning therefore had to be completed before procurement formally took control of the process.
Constraints
Automate data movement into the reporting environment through a scheduled ETL process.
Record each customer's technology platform within Salesforce so Marketing could target communications appropriately.
Clearly date offline reports so customers could immediately identify when data had last been refreshed.
Ensure Sales and Customer Success worked together throughout strategic customer engagements, supported by accurate Salesforce records and regular internal communication.
Use executive workshops immediately before the RFP to align the customer around a shared future vision and demonstrate capabilities that addressed both their objectives and competitive alternatives.
Recommendations
The recommendations were adopted across multiple teams. Marketing began tailoring communications based on each customer's technology platform, allowing legacy customers to be introduced to new capabilities in an appropriate and commercially relevant way.
Sales and Customer Success established a more coordinated approach to customer communication, with the client specifically commenting on how much more cohesive the organisation had become. The automated ETL process eliminated the reporting inconsistencies, with report date stamping restored confidence in the analysis being presented.
The customer subsequently renewed on a five-year contract worth £1.4 million ARR, representing approximately 15% growth over the previous agreement.
Results
Understanding why a major product launch failed to meet expectations
Executive leadership engaged me after the launch of a major LLM capability received a much weaker response from existing customers than expected. My role was to determine why customer adoption had fallen short, identify the underlying causes, and recommend practical improvements.
My Role
The company had invested heavily in developing a new AI capability and expected strong adoption from its existing customer base. Instead, customer reactions were mixed. While some customers were enthusiastic, many were hesitant or negative about adopting the new technology. Leadership initially viewed this as a product adoption problem. The investigation quickly suggested something much broader.
Context
Customers who responded negatively were segmented according to the status of their existing implementations. This revealed a clear pattern. Customers who had experienced delays during implementation, or were still waiting for projects to be completed, were unwilling to invest in additional technology. Customers whose implementations had gone smoothly were generally much more willing. Further investigation therefore shifted away from the product itself and towards implementation, operational processes and customer-facing teams to understand what had created these perceptions.
Investigation
What We Discovered
The investigation found that the product itself was rarely the problem. Instead, customer confidence had been damaged by previous implementation experiences. Resource shortages, outdated implementation processes, inconsistent training and accumulated technical debt all contributed to delays that many customers still remembered long after their projects had gone live.
For customers who had not experienced delays in implementation issues, a different pattern emerged. Many believed their new feature requests were being ignored while new products continued to be launched. At the same time, Customer Success teams had not been sufficiently prepared for new products, leaving them unable to confidently explain the new capability to the customers who trusted them most.
The recommendations needed to work within significant organisational constraints. There was no budget for additional implementation headcount, engineering teams were already committed to next year's product roadmap, large-scale retraining was impractical, and the organisation had no formal Product Management function.
Constraints
Improve project initiation, resource planning and implementation readiness to build customer confidence from the beginning of every project.
Update implementation processes and documentation to reflect current products and ways of working.
Introduce targeted, modular training for implementation teams involved in new technology deployments.
Establish a formal Product Management function responsible for roadmap ownership, customer request management, product adoption and go-to-market strategy.
Create a structured product launch process that aligned Product Management, Product Marketing, Customer Success and Implementation before future releases.
Recommendations
Executive leadership used the findings to accelerate the creation of a dedicated Product Management function, appointing a Chief Product Officer to lead product strategy and introducing clearer ownership of customer requests, roadmap prioritisation and go-to-market communications.
A formal go-to-market readiness process was established, ensuring Customer Success teams were prepared before new products launched and could confidently discuss new capabilities with customers. Implementation processes, documentation, planning and training were strengthened, leading to more consistent project delivery and improved customer confidence.
Future product launches received a significantly stronger initial response from existing customers, resulting in improved adoption of new technology and greater confidence in the organisation's ability to deliver it successfully.