Connecting Sales, Project Delivery and Finance
How a leading marketing communications company gained a single view of every client engagement, from the first opportunity through delivery to payment.
The Situation
The company was winning work and delivering it well. What it could not do was see the whole of a client engagement in one place.
Client information lived in one process. Proposals in another. Project costs somewhere else again, with invoices and collections separate from all of it. Each handover between business development, the project teams and finance happened manually, which meant it happened at whatever speed somebody remembered to do it.
The effects showed up everywhere. Nobody could say reliably where a given opportunity stood. Project income and costs were hard to pull together, so profitability by client or project was a question that took days to answer. Approvals, invoicing and collection follow-up all ran late. Records of what had been agreed with a client were inconsistent, because they lived in whoever’s inbox had sent the email.
Underneath it all sat a great many spreadsheets, none of which knew about each other.
What we did
We assessed the commercial and financial workflows first, then translated the gaps we found into practical digital use cases. That order matters. Starting from software gives you a system that fits the software. Starting from the workflow gives you a system that fits the business.
What we designed was an operating system connecting revenue generation, project execution and financial performance as one continuous flow rather than three separate handovers.
Inside the work
The design covered lead and opportunity management, client and contact records, and proposal and quotation tracking, with sales-stage controls and follow-up reminders so opportunities stopped going quiet unnoticed.
From there it ran into project creation and job-level financial tracking, so the cost of delivering a piece of work attached to the work itself rather than sitting in a general ledger. Customer invoicing and collection monitoring followed, alongside supplier and project expense recording.
Commercial and financial approval workflows were built in at the points that needed them, and management reporting was layered across pipeline, projects and receivables.
The result was a clear line of information from the moment a prospect entered the pipeline through to project completion, billing and payment. One thread, rather than three.
The outcome
- A single view of each client relationship, end to end
- Faster handovers between commercial, operational and finance teams
- Visibility into project revenue, costs and margins
- Consistent quotation, approval and invoicing processes
- Better monitoring of outstanding customer balances
- Client communication and commercial commitments recorded in one place
- Reduced dependence on disconnected spreadsheets
- More reliable information behind commercial decisions
Does this sound familiar?
Turning technology into business results
These engagements show how we work. Each began with an operational problem rather than a piece of software.
