The Client
A leading wholesale distributor of fast-moving-consumer-goods [FMCG], focusing on the Lebanese market.

Main challenges

• Intensifying local competition
• Increasing customer sophistication and expectations from distributors

Approach
The 5-month assignment conducted by CDS involved a comprehensive institutional audit of the company’s sales activities and a sector analysis of the Lebanese FMCG market; this served as a platform to align the company’s sales strategy with customers’ evolving expectations, and subsequently to establish an appropriate sales organization that best facilitates the new strategy.

Impact: selected results

• Shift to a client-focused sales strategy
• Restructuring of the company’s sales organization
• Optimization of all warehousing and distribution activities

The client says …
During the first 8 weeks on the job, CDS performed a thorough audit of the situation at our company. This audit covered the sales department, as well as all other departments that have a direct or an indirect interface with Sales. This implied interviewing employees at all levels of the organization as well as analyzing various sales-related activities in the office, in the field, in the warehouse, etc.

During this phase, CDS consultants also interviewed a number of our customers in order to obtain a clear perception of how the trade viewed our company.

This excellent and thorough analysis of the prevailing situation provided us with a clear awareness of what needed to be changed or developed in our company.

CDS consultants then prepared a solid set of practical solutions to reorganize our national sales activity. They derived these solutions partly from what had been learned during the audit phase; they also integrated and adapted global trends in the distribution of consumer goods. During this phase, CDS consultants gave us a hard time … challenging our preconceived opinions. But their work was excellent, and in the end, we fully adopted the solutions they recommended.

Finally, CDS worked closely with our top and middle managers to prepare a detailed plan for implementing the new sales organization. Implementation was also facilitated by the fact that we all believed in the solution, and by the fact that CDS succeeded in motivating employees at all levels of the organization.

In my opinion, the key success factors of CDS are: hard work, clear-sighted, and dynamism. In short, they are professionals. And perhaps the best measure of our satisfaction is that now that our sales activity is reorganized, we have asked CDS to assess and restructure our national warehousing and distribution systems.

Chairman