9. From Restructuring to Optimisation: Enabling a Sales and Marketing Function

Changing requirements of the corporate setup lead firms to revisit their own organisations from time to time. Triggers for such changes arise from a range of factors such as cost reduction, diversification or specialisation, business optimisation, technology implementation, talent movements, mergers and acquisitions and consolidation. The organisation structure is the backbone to a corporate setup that immediately needs to adapt and/or evolve to such triggers. In this chapter, I will present a case study of my experience of being part of team that was engaged in restructuring the Sales and Marketing function of a major manufacturing company in India operating in the iron and steel industry in 2013. Our (the consulting team) engagement with the client was a journey where we were called in purely from the intent of rightsizing the organisation with a scientific restructuring methodology. However, our engagement made our mandate transition from a mindset of restructuring to optimisation, from rightsizing to development and from change immediacy to learning orientation.