Putting ourselves in their shoes was the cornerstone to elevate our success

Por Paola Salmán, Managing Director, SIGSA & Javier Cuellar, Business Development, Americas

At the Global Distributors Summit, we (SIGSA) presented our Geospatial Strategy approach that enabled our clients to achieve their 5-year goals. Below is a summary of our experience. As you read further, we would like to pose a question: If you were presented with the same client requests, what would you have done?

Our story

Back in October of last year, we received an invitation to meet with the senior director of the expansion department from OXXO, a several years ArcGIS User with more than 22,000 convenience stores just in Mexico, and 400+ in other countries in Latin America, including Chile, Peru, Colombia, and recently in Brazil as well. The meeting started with him sharing the recent announcement of the company's goal to double their sales in the following 5 years, and the work in progress to establish the strategy to support that aspiration. Suddenly, he said a phrase that got stuck in our mind for days: “We know ArcGIS is the best technology available to support our market expansion. At the same time, we feel we have a Mercedes-Benz that we use as a small Ford Fiesta daily”.

It didn’t take us much time to realize that we needed to take a deep dive into their business and their specific challenges, to propose an action plan in line with their 5-year growth aspiration, while providing business solutions, beyond just our licenses, to their business challenges today.

From that point on, we embarked on a business consultive exercise with OXXO to create a joint Geospatial Strategy where we talked to all department directors involved in the expansion process. We learned that their business growth success was directly connected to their speed of opening new stores. They took more than 400 days to open a new one since they identified the candidate location for it. The two main challenges to significantly reduce that time were intimately connected to: 1) Empowering their regional and zone teams to confirm faster the new store locations, and 2) Enabling effective alignment and collaboration of all areas involved in opening the store (expansion, real states, construction, engineering, supplies distribution, and HR).

With the business challenges clear, we were able to build a set of solutions that enabled new capabilities for the region and zone teams, and for all departments involved. We identified not only the ArcGIS products needed, but most importantly, the new workflows, and the people skills needed to implement the solutions.

Successful outcome

Earlier this year, we flew to their HQ in Monterrey to have an executive briefing with OXXO to present the outcome of our joint work. We delivered an executive presentation that included what we learned from their business, the solution diagram we wanted to propose, and finally, showcased our technology, in line with the specific context of their business goals. The reaction from all the executives in that meeting room was extremely positive. It was clear to us that everyone in that room was in full agreement with our findings related to the challenges that were preventing them from opening stores faster. It was also clear how the proposed solutions were designed, but also how empowering and enabling their field people were a fundamental part of the solution.

After that meeting, OXXO confirmed back we are a key part of their growth strategy for the following 5 years. They are now including the roadmap we proposed as part of their own strategy, and we are getting ready to work with them in implementing the roadmap in the following months.

A Geospatial strategy is a focused business plan that defines how an organization will use GIS to achieve its objectives and desired results. Our objective in the process is to offer complete solutions to our user challenges, based on a “Business First” approach. Getting into the User shoes, leaving yours behind, it is the cornerstone of a successful process in creating the strategy.

Here are a few Geospatial strategy questions to consider when working with your client:

1. What does success look like for your organization?
2. What are your main business objectives?
3. What are the main challenges/issues to achieving those objectives?

And for us, the Sales Community of practice represents a great opportunity to share this experience and other best-in-class business practices and have the “Business First” approach become a fundamental part of the consultive sales culture at all distributors.  

Thank you,

Paola Salman, Managing Director, SIGSA

Javier Cuellar, Business Development, Americas