CSC: a consulting revenue growth anomaly

One major change that CSC has made to the way it operates is to introduce a new customer relationship management role to retain clients and cross-sell capabilities to them. In the UK there are now 10 executives in role developing business relationships. Brian Lever, VP BSS explains that solutions are not led by large scale bid teams but by these skilled individuals. Lever has gone one step further and takes responsibility at his level for P&Ls so that there is no competition at account level between CSC sales representing different internal lines of business. This single CSC account model is led by relationship management consulting.

Now at first sight, such a statement might elicit a yawn, after all consultants live and die by relationship management don’t they? But when Lever uses the phrase it has a subtly different connotation which might just suggest why his BSS area is currently trouncing traditional consulting arms in terms of revenue growth. First of all, in EMEA, CSC is an outsourcing-led solutions business which generates an internal culture driven by client advocacy and delivery expertise. This is a very different starting point than most IT service consultancy-led businesses have because they have evolved from commercially-combative partner models. Such models have a culture born from country-led thought leader-based partnership structures which eschew inter-partnership, cross-country collaboration. So, although such traditional consulting arms excel at network-based selling within their partner structures, they struggle to deliver relationship-based selling across business areas. Lever’s advantage is the ability to blend CSC’s European outsourcing-led solutions business with a new clear sales ethos that pulls all parts of CSC’s capabilities together behind client advocates.

The art of this approach lies with holding the P&L accountability at a high enough level that account growth counts for more within operational management processes than does line of business revenue growth. Secondly, success also depends upon some productisation of the solutions so that they can be sold in a repeatable way and do not become dependent on highly specialised sales skills. So far, Lever has managed to do the first of these and has his Solutions Masterclass sales program underway to address the second issue. In traditional consultancy businesses where the P&L per customer account is disaggregated it is very difficult to manage a downturn because as customer budgets tighten internal competition becomes increasingly vicious with knock-on impact in terms of internal sales and delivery morale. By contrast the CSC professionals attending the Solutions MasterClass that I was invited to appeared confident, candid about which solutions would work for their accounts, but eager to learn about the different solutions presented by the offer experts.

This is not to suggest that CSC is complacent and has discovered a panacea: indeed, CEO Mike Laphen referenced in the Q2 results announcement that “demand for short term IT consulting projects is still subdued and this is currently impacting our BSS sector”. But it does go some way to explaining why CSC is bucking the recessionary trend in growing project services revenues.