esellas has worked with EY over the past two years on discrete projects that have given us a powerful glimpse into how the firm operates, particularly a deeper view of its business development and sales function. 

Over the past few months, we’ve talked with numerous people at various levels across the firm. Here’s what we understand is happening at EY: 

• EY is thriving—sales are very strong, in particular, larger strategic deals are on the rise.

• The headwinds that are impacting many companies today appear to be a major tailwind for EY.

• The combined revenues of $49.4 Billion are a 14.2% increase. It’s the highest in the firm’s history.  

• There is a significant focus on expanding its ecosystem of partners. EY has 102 ecosystem relationships and 67 alliances, including 17 new business alliances in 2023.  

• Headcount continues to grow at 8.2% as EY has nearly 400,000 people globally. The firm continues to invest heavily in its people by delivering an all-time high of 24 million training hours and $385M of investment. 

• Ensure everyone hits their number. 

• Increase win rates by capturing the winning formulas and leveraging the best practices across more deals.  

• Implement a sales compensation model that supports the firm's goals and incentivizes the right behavior. 

• Create a new support account model that supports the firm’s shift from a service line to an industry-aligned go-to-market motion.

• Industrialize and standardize the best parts of the business development function. 

• Increase the relevance of its 700 colleagues inside the firm and on the front line with clients. 

• Use technology to modernize the selling experience and improve sales productivity and performance.

• Become better at both relationship-building and content-led industry-credentialed selling. 

• Drive strong co-selling motions with key partners and alliance partners. 

In place of its “unbreakup”, EY leaders have a unique opportunity to rethink how they operate and restructure their organization. The next part of this document is intended to provide some input to reimagine The EY Way of Selling.  

Living in a time of paradox

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” - Charles Dickens.

There has never been a better or more challenging time in sales. These opposing views are an essential paradox to grasp in leading sales and business development organizations today.  

1. Selling is more challenging than ever because the bar is higher (than ever) to get a buyer’s attention, gain access and create value.  Buyers have all of the information they need to make a purchase decision.  It is causing them to question the relevance of a salesperson. 

2. Buyers ask themselves, “Why do they need to engage a salesperson if they can get what they need without the added pressure or friction?” The result is more buyers are choosing a rep-free path.

3. Added to this challenge is that 7X as many stakeholders are involved in a single purchase. Each stakeholder wants a unique and personalized experience. Since many buyers are 2/3 of the way through a purchase, a salesperson engages them; buyers are moving at a speed that often outpaces the salesperson on the other side of the deal.  

This modern buying paradigm requires a salesperson to go wider to cover more stakeholders, go deeper to uncover each stakeholder’s unique interest, and move faster.  It’s stretching even the most sophisticated and digitally savvy salesperson. 

“When you add up the number of internal and administrative responsibilities of a salesperson, it’s no surprise that sales and business development people spend less than 30% of their time selling.”  

The KPIs used to measure sales performance indicated that it’s gotten harder, takes longer, and costs more to sell through a salesforce.  The net effect in sales is attrition is at an all-time high, and quota attainment is at an all-time low. 

Sales is in a tough spot, but we’re sure the profession has hit an inflexion point.

New thinking, new ways of working, and new technology are changing everything. Companies are becoming data-driven to reduce guesswork and increase precision; they are more buyer-centric to reduce friction and enable buyers on their purchase journey rather than slowing them down. The most progressive companies are redesigning the selling experience to improve productivity, increase output and bring joy back to selling.  

In the near term future of sales, we expect the following:

• The sales experience will change dramatically in the next few years.

• Increased reward, additional motivation and joy will return sales to its position as Earth's most thrilling profession.

• Technology (AI and automation in particular) will give salespeople the superpowers needed to thrive in the modern buying paradigm.

• The days of ‘spraying and praying’ to hit a target will disappear.

• Precision and focus will replace the traditional vague and opaque world of sales plans and forecasts.

• Conversations between buyers and sellers will be driven through thoughtful hypotheses tied to the clients real problem.

“The resurgence of the full-cycle seller and the trusted sales professional is rapidly emerging by combining human + artificial intelligence and enhancing performance.  

esellas - people

At esellas, we’ve led, managed, supported and taught thousands of sales professionals. We have presided over billions of dollars of deals. It’s helped us to understand how things actually work. We know how services and solutions are bought and sold, deals won or lost, and trust either built or eroded.  

We’ve embedded - the intelligence, methodologies, teachings and practices - into our solutions. We’ve proven to be great at sales and of real value to our clients, demanding that we’re great at being human. The adage stays true - to sell is to serve, solve, and bring solutions to problems. Success in sales takes great curiosity, incredible creativity and great care for your customer.

Today, selling is highly analytical; it requires the courage to be creative—to experiment with new things. To stay curious and, at the same time, apply the rigor and discipline to execute consistently.

esellas - sales

The role of sales and business development is one of the most thrilling, dynamic, and challenging jobs on the planet.  

It’s also one of the most important rules for business as markets are tighter, competition is more fierce, and expectations are higher than ever. Almost anything can be copied—we live in a highly commoditized world—everything looks the same. 

Buyers are having an increasingly difficult time distinguishing one solution from another. Any company's opportunity to differentiate is how value, trust and impact are realised and how its front-line people engage its customers and prospects.

Selling is more important than ever, and salespeople must be better.

esellas-technology

Technology accelerates/amplifies a person’s curiosity, creativity, and caring ability. 

AI has become a great equaliser for the sales rep who struggles to be an influential analyst or researcher.

• For early career professionals who may lack the pattern recognition or instincts that only come with experience, technology is filling the knowledge gap and lifting their performance.

• For anyone in sales, technology is accelerating learning, increasing iteration, and enabling more experimentation at a faster rate.

Sales professionals will soon have an ‘Ironman’ suit that puts them in the right place, at the right time, armed with the right insights and solutions to extinguish any problem a client encounters. 

It’s the future of sales and what we’re enabling and delivering at esellas.  

We’ve helped dozens of the largest and fastest-growing companies solve their most formidable growth challenges. While we have much more to learn about EY, here are some ways we can help the firm: 

• Further codifying and scaling the EY Way of Selling

• Align its 700 business development colleagues around EY’s new vision, priorities and plans

• Accelerate the transformation from a service-line selling motion to an industry, account-based model

• Reinforce the actions and behaviours that enable business development teams to thrive in the new buying paradigm

• Using machine learning and AI-powered platforms to enhance individual sales performance dramatically  

• Increase the productivity and the production of the individual reps by prioritizing accounts—analyzing markets—performing critical research—identifying buying signals—and activating reps in the moments that matter—Increase the relevance of the business development team in the eyes of both clients and GCSPs 

• Sell with more speed, accuracy, agility and efficiency.  

The following is the format we use with other clients to unlock performance.  Our approach would adapt to the phase of your transformation journey and maturity of EY’s capability and level of intervention EY is open to from esellas) 

How We Would Engage Fast

Build The Revenue Reimagined ‘Blueprint’—The Foundations of the Future Of Sales for EY

1. Apply a world-class, proven, accelerated approach to solving the abovementioned challenges.

2. Identify the strategy, blueprint and roadmap that will result in the high-performing revenue and sales operation.

3. Engage with the key stakeholders in ways that will inspire them—the accountable and the responsible.

Phase I - Rapid Assessment, Design and Alignment  (Typically 6-10 weeks)

Overview - Developing a deep understanding of the current business sales operation and building a blueprint of the future vision and an implementation roadmap plan.  

Selected Key Activities:

• Interview 7-10 EY stakeholders (An option to widen this considerably through our assessment platform)

• Manage stakeholder expectations.

• Gather crucial corporate information and specific and related knowledge.

• Review critical sales assets, documentation, tools, and templates.

• Deploy online assessments and evaluations.

• Facilitate an immersive transformation workshop. 

• Establish the strategic and operational frameworks.

• Evaluate the maturity of the current sales operation. 

• Interview selected clients from recent wins and losses. 

• Participate in weekly must-win deals. 

• Review target account lists and ideal customer profiles

• Performance win-loss analysis by interviewing selected customers 

• Evaluate the active sales pipeline 

• Assess the external market and review the value proposition 

Outcomes and Outputs :

• Aligned leadership and decision-making team

• A shared/inspiring vision for the next stage of growth

• A unique position for the business that can be sustained over the long term

• An Operational Blueprint for a Coherent Selling Engine 

• A new sales operating cadence owned by the whole team

• A compelling and well-understood foundation, story and playbook of value propositions

• Sales maturity assessment and transformation roadmap 

• Ownership and engagement in the plans by those accountable for delivering it.

A complete narrative, deliverables, and recommendations for what follows.

Cost $250K

Phase II Activate & Accelerate - Enablement-as-a-Service 

Building upon the insights gained during the Assess and Align phase, esellas will collaborate with EY, deploying the right tools, processes, and industry expertise focused on enabling revenue and profitability expansion, accelerating adoption and adherence to sales best practices while creating a higher standard and consistent approach to deal management and growth execution. 

To achieve these outcomes in the early stage of our engagement, we will design, deploy, and industrialize the following:

• Operating Cadences and stakeholder governance to monitor and manage the execution of the sales pipeline

• Deal support and opportunity management tools (Opportunity Health Check, Strategy and Advancement Labs, engagement plans, close plans and process documentation to support qualification and deal advancement

• Recommended KPIs, metrics, and reporting views to give you the data you need to make informed decisions, track progress, and continually refine your GTM engine's performance

• Sales forecasting to include a foundational methodology and process steps as the basis to sales management system

• Instrumentation for leadership with comprehensive dashboards and deal insights, illuminating pipeline health and performance, enabling optimal strategies to drive results.

• Expert "coaching" model that ensures your sales teams have immediate access to expert guidance, tools, and resources

Outcomes and benefit realization

During this phase of our engagement, EY should expect:

• Win Rate improvements as a result of consistent deal qualification and execution in addition

• Accelerating the end-to-end sales cycle, reducing the time from qualification to close, further extending your sales capacity.

• Yield expansion / reduced sales expense

• Sustainable revenue growth

• Forecast Accuracy

Cost: TBD 

Phase III Guided Sales Support

A modern guided selling platform underpins our sales support system, it’s human-enabled and AI-powered.  Our platform gives the salespeople and consultants on front-line sales professionals the lift needed to thrive in the modern buying paradigm.  

We call it ella. 

ella solves four fundamental problems that erode a person’s confidence and prevent reps from taking action.  We call them moments that matter: 

Problem 1 - Access to accurate data 

Problem 2 - Prioritizing accounts based on most likely to-buy 

Problem 3 - Engaging with and understanding buyers’ needs 

Problem 4 - Advancing and closing deals 

ella—a sales companion, places the entire selling experience in the palm of your hand in a modern mobile application to enable and accelerate sales.  Today, ella does four specific jobs that dramatically increase sales efficiency and effectiveness.  

ella is not just another tool; it's a trusted aide at the front line of sales. An intelligent companion that guides your sales representatives every step of the way, providing precise insights and advice at every critical juncture in a sales cycle. 

ella informs sales professionals where to invest time, who to engage, what to say, how to probe, and how to propel a deal forward. ella is the embodiment of smart, simple, and effective selling.

Account Propensity

We start with a simple data feed of the addressable market/account territory, which we enrich through a combination of 3rd party and in-house data to apply our propensity logic and prioritize the territory in full alignment with your company’s ideal client profile.    

Buyer Personas

Building upon the “where” to focus component of our solution, we then identify the ‘who’ to focus on per your target buyer profile(s), identifying and analyzing potential prospects, developing a robust buyer profile enriched with social insights, relationship mapping, potential connections and thoughts approaches for direct engagement. 

Insights and Actions

In today’s digital world, meeting our prospective buyers along their journey is fundamental to earning and maintaining their trust and confidence in your ability to create value for them.  We enable this by continuously collecting and curating account and individual insights.

Simply stated, we harvest data across disparate but related sources we then synthesize into actionable insights, positioning sales reps as a thought leader for their clients and providing them with confidence in their next action.  

Human Element

While technology undisputedly can deliver substantial efficiency and effectiveness in a seller’s experience, we believe expert human intervention further extends these advantages, which is the spirit that we developed our digital scouting and coaching services.

Our scouts are experts in utilizing technology to enable positive selling experiences and providing your sales professionals with complete optimisation of your sales tech investments.

Finally, we all know the best teams with winning records are put in this position due to their coaches.  Following this principle, we have built an unparalleled network of sales coaches with deep domain and industry experience to guide your sales professionals to the next level of performance.

We Are In Business To Accelerate Performance

Below is a sample of the outcomes we’ve been able to drive for our clients: 

• Highly engaged sellers

• Improved quota attainment

• Efficiency usage of time

A Quick Look At Some Numbers:

• EXPANDED PIPELINE—115% increase in qualified deals.

• EFFORT SAVED—24000 hours more selling time.

• ENHANCED PERFORMANCE—>10% increase in win rate.

• ENJOYMENT INCREASED—100% happier reps*

*OK, we took some liberties with the happiness stat. But supported reps are happier reps and happy reps sell more, as much as 20% more!