Case Studies

The Situation

ConAgra’s $1.2 billion food ingredients division had been assembled through acquisition, and it showed. Three legacy sales organizations were still operating as separate companies — different processes, different customer relationships, different definitions of a good account. Sales, marketing, and customer service each ran autonomously, with no shared view of which channels or customers were worth pursuing. Overlapping coverage was expensive. Customer experience varied depending on which legacy organization happened to own the relationship.

The acquisitions had closed. The company they were supposed to become had not.

What Was Done

The work started with analysis rather than reorganization. The $1.2B marketplace was segmented by channel and by customer to establish where the division actually made money and where it was buying revenue. That analysis drove a redefined go-to-market strategy, including the international sales strategy across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Only then came the structural work: consolidating three sales organizations into one, and integrating sales, marketing, and customer service through deliberate process engineering rather than a reporting-line change. Roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and KPIs were defined explicitly — including the cross-functional handoffs where integrations usually fail. Training and supporting tools were built and delivered so the new organization could actually operate the way it was designed to.

What Changed

• Revenue up 16%*
• Profitability up 22%*
• Headcount reduced 20%*
• Measurable improvement in customer service quality and customer satisfaction

Relevant if: you have completed an acquisition and six months later you still have two sales forces, two processes, and an unclear answer to who owns which account.

The Situation

PepsiCo created a new $300 million direct sales division by combining the foodservice and vending sales forces of Frito-Lay, Quaker Foods, Gatorade, and Tropicana. On paper it was obvious: one salesperson, one relationship, four portfolios.

In practice it meant merging four company cultures with genuinely different levels of sales sophistication, four sets of customer relationships, and four groups of people who each believed their way of selling was the right one. The division was organized into four regions, all attempting the same integration simultaneously.

What Was Done

Co-led the Southeast region — a $300M P&L with five direct reports and 55 sales professionals — through the integration. The work was less about strategy than about making a merged organization function: establishing common selling processes across the four legacy groups, building shared account planning, and putting in place the performance monitoring that let leadership see what was actually happening rather than what was being reported.

Volume, trade spending, and selling expense were forecast to 98% accuracy — which mattered because in the first year of a merger nobody trusts the numbers, and a forecast people believe is what allows decisions to get made at all.

What Changed

• The only region of four to beat plan in the first year
• Volume up 11%
• Profit up 14%

Relevant if: you are integrating sales organizations and discovering that the synergy case assumed people would simply start working together.

The Situation

A $3.2 billion food packaging division was competing almost entirely on price. The sales organization had been built for transactional, bid-based selling of commodity products — take the spec, quote the number, discount if you have to. Margin eroded a little more every year, and the sales force had no mechanism to stop it because nothing in their process, their skills, or their incentives pointed anywhere else.

Marketing understood the customer. Sales talked to the customer. The two rarely met.

What Was Done

Designed a new sales operating strategy that shifted the organization from commodity transactions toward value-added custom packaging solutions built on consumer insight. That required three things to change at once, which is why partial versions of this fail: the selling methodology itself — a consultative approach, designed and then actually trained and deployed; the alignment between marketing and sales so that insight reached the customer conversation; and the operating processes that supported the new motion rather than the old one.

What Changed

• Approximately $75M in incremental revenue*
• Improved profit margins and market share
• Higher customer retention
• Improved employee and customer satisfaction

Relevant if: your sales team defends price instead of creating value, and you suspect the problem is the system rather than the people.

The Situation

Coors Light was underperforming with Hispanic consumers — a segment central to the brand’s growth. The existing approach segmented that market demographically, which produced marketing that described the audience accurately and connected with it poorly.

There was a second problem, and it was the harder one. In beer, the brewer does not reach the consumer. The distributor network does. A national strategy that distributors do not believe in is a document.

What Was Done

Re-segmented the Hispanic market from demographic-based to occasion-based — organizing around when and why people drink rather than who they are. That reframing changed what the brand needed to say and where it needed to show up.

The second half of the engagement was execution architecture: researching what the distributor network was already doing, understanding their economics and incentives, and building the strategy in a way distributors would adopt. Their buy-in was treated as a design constraint rather than a rollout step, which is the reason the strategy actually reached shelf.

What Changed

• Approximately $85M in incremental revenue*
• Distributor network aligned and executing against a common strategy

Relevant if: your growth depends on brokers or distributors executing a plan they had no part in building.

The Situation

A private-equity-owned company operating at roughly $75 million, growing fast, with no standardized way of operating. Business units performed inconsistently, and leadership could not reliably tell which ones were in trouble until the trouble was visible in the financials. Forecasting was unreliable enough that planning was largely guesswork. The flagship business unit was the worst performer in the system.

This is the scaling transition in its most literal form: a company that had outgrown the informal system that built it.

What Was Done

The flagship unit came first — a full turnaround covering the operating model, the cost structure, the offering portfolio (reduced from 56 programs to 24 to concentrate on what actually worked), and the culture. Worst to first in 16 months.

That became the template. Across the region, the work was building the infrastructure the company had never had: standardized departmental KPIs, defined operating policies and procedures, consistent management routines for business unit leadership, and management reporting that made performance visible at the corporate level. Annual strategic planning was run with each business unit and translated into integrated, metric-based operating plans.

With that system in place, the company could open new units and integrate acquisitions without each one improvising — including launching an entirely new division and brand, the first of its kind in the country.

What Changed

• Company revenue from $75M to $350M* over four years
• Flagship unit revenue from $12M to $24M; named Business Unit of the Year
• Forecast accuracy improved substantially*
• Employee turnover down 60%; employee satisfaction up 70%
• Multiple greenfield units opened* and a new division launched

Relevant if: you are adding locations, products, or people faster than you are adding the processes to manage them.

The Situation

First Avenue Ventures backs early-stage companies across 20+ portfolio holdings. The recurring pattern across those companies is familiar to anyone who invests at that stage: a real product, real customers, and a sales function that exists entirely inside the founder’s head. The founder can sell. The company cannot.

That gap is what stops companies from reaching institutional funding — not the technology, and usually not the market.

What Was Done

Ongoing work across the portfolio, tailored to where each company is stuck. Depending on the situation that has meant validating product-market fit, designing go-to-market and segmentation, building standardized and documented sales processes, implementing CRM with the routines and performance monitoring that make it useful rather than decorative, hiring and training sales talent, and in several cases stepping in directly as interim Chief Revenue Officer.

For a construction-sector FinTech company, that meant building a standardized marketing and sales process and client acquisition strategy from nothing, implementing CRM improvements that created consistent operating routines, and personally leading key accounts. Other engagements have included serving as CRO for a life science company and conducting activity-based costing analysis that led a healthcare analytics company to revise its pricing strategy — alongside commercial due diligence on prospective investments.

What Changed

“Mike Largent supports our 20+ First Avenue Venture portfolio companies as they go from early stage to institutional funding… Helping these companies create scalable sales processes requires an excellent grasp of the sales process — from lead generation to close. More than anything, working across these companies requires a doer, and Mike is that and more — executing at a high level with outstanding professionalism and relentless focus on getting the job done.”

— Mike Goodrich, Principal, First Avenue Ventures

Relevant if: you are an investor with portfolio companies that have product-market fit and no repeatable way to sell.