Mission & vision

Core growth

Business process redesign

Portfolio strategy

Growth via acquisitions

Capability sourcing

Optimizing the core

Growth via adjacencies

Complexity reduction

Shareholder value

Turnaround strategy

Profit maximization

Strategic planning

Venture consulting

Front line

Leadership

Capital management

Customer management

People

JVs and alliances

Marketing

High-performance culture

Outsourcing

Pricing

Decision making

SG&A management

Sales/channel management

Mission & Vision

The mission and vision statement is a company's proclamation to its employees and other stakeholders about its business goals and aspirations as an organization.  In the financial services industry, changing markets and customers periodically require companies to reevaluate their strategic mission.  A sound mission and value statement is brief, memorable and pragmatic, as well as inspiring.  It serves to focus employees on the highest objectives of the company, and thus becomes a cornerstone of corporate strategy.  ECHELON helps clients build and refine their mission and vision statements as part of strategy engagements.

Creating a sound mission and vision statement is the first step in building strategies that help clients to reach their full potential.  This work is not done in a vacuum.  ECHELON gathers and tests data from relevant stakeholders to ground a client's aspirations in statements that are also feasible and practical.  Working with a company's stakeholders, ECHELON identifies refinements to the mission and vision, and weigh the implications of any changes necessary in the current business model.

Portfolio Strategy

Portfolio strategy helps a company determine where its resources can be best deployed, through a detailed strategic and financial review of its business holdings.  Developing a portfolio strategy allows a client's executives to determine with greater certainty where they should focus among a variety of businesses.  It enables them to identify targets for acquisition or divestiture, as well as current assets that could add more value to the company if they were managed to their full potential.  ECHELON evaluates clients' portfolios to update where they should place their competitive emphasis.

When markets shift, ECHELON helps clients uncover the growth opportunities within their businesses, supported by our ongoing monitoring of key industry metrics and trends.  ECHELON employs that information to assess how well the client is performing relative to the industry's best practices and the marketplace's full potential.  ECHELON determines which opportunities companies can exploit further, expand into or exit, based on unfulfilled customer needs, emerging markets, geography and technologies. 

Optimizing the Corporate Center

Where can the corporate center add value to the enterprise, and where is it a drag on performance?  Examining the role of the center helps CEOs of companies with bloated or ineffectual structures determine the best organizational model for their firm or group of holdings.  It allows for improved decision making and resource allocation by assigning which functions and decisions are the center's responsibility, and which the operating units can best handle.  ECHELON focuses on limiting the center's role to where it aligns capabilities, strategy, culture and people.

ECHELON starts with an assessment of key functions, comparing the informational, reporting and cost advantages of centralization versus decentralization.  As part of this work, ECHELON quantifies the benefits of moving or maintaining various corporate roles.  ECHELON then helps design a new blueprint for the center, develop ways to communicate the center's role to the organization, and set up an ongoing evaluation program.

Shareholder Value

Shareholder value is a critical measure for every company; increasing it is the ultimate objective of virtually every ECHELON engagement.  ECHELON helps clients boost enterprise value through short-term profit hunts, better communications to shareholders, improved asset management, changes to capital structure and shareholder distributions, and long-term performance improvements.

Using our benchmarks in the client's area of expertise, ECHELON creates programs that will enhance valuation.  In particular, ECHELON focuses on developing and communicating a credible growth story to all stakeholders.  ECHELON also relies on an analytic tool kit that quantifies how strategic initiatives will affect profitability, growth, and shareholder value.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning takes a holistic look at a company's aspirations, testing and refining corporate objectives.  The plan includes mapping a self-correcting process to achieve new levels of performance.  It helps companies decide where to focus, where to compete and how to allocate resources.  Strategic planning serves as a starting point for such related work as growth, portfolio strategy, and M&A strategy.

Surprisingly, companies often fail to take a long-term view in strategic planning, mistakenly believing it does not necessarily lead to higher returns.  ECHELON helps clients incorporate a long-term perspective into their strategies, while focusing on the biggest issues they currently face and on the best way to get results.

Throughout the process, ECHELON reviews and challenges clients' strategy assumptions.  ECHELON works to identify the largest opportunities to build value within the company and develop an understanding of how its current performance compares with its full corporate potential.  ECHELON helps clients identify capability gaps and marketplace opportunities and set up tactical goals and tracking systems that ensure results.

Organization makes the difference.  In an increasingly complex world, organization is the key which enables businesses to act with speed and adaptability.  What sets apart the high performers is the quality of their decision-making. They make the most important decisions well, and then they make them happen, quickly and consistently.

High-performance organizations build a system, not just a structure.  The high performers are not overly focused on the organization (org) chart - who reports to whom - but put their energy into building an integrated system that supports a decision-driven organization.  They seek to outperform competitors on five vital dimensions:

1. Provide compelling direction and leadership
2. Define clear decision roles and hold the people in them accountable
3. Develop and deploy talented people
4. Excel at front line execution
5. Tap into the "extra 10 percent" with a high-performance culture

An effective organizational change process is almost as important as making the right changes.  Significant organizational change is distracting and can be threatening to almost everyone.  Starting a change process without following through can be highly damaging.  The key is to ensure the process is led not simply managed - top management must take an active and visible role.  Organizational effectiveness is central to ECHELON's mission of helping clients make their businesses more valuable.

Leadership

When there's clarity from the top, the rest of the organization knows what to focus on.  The best leaders can express a compelling vision and clear priorities for what it takes to succeed in the business, as well as "the way we do things around here," usually in a single breath.  A compelling vision goes beyond stirring words.  Top-performing teams reinforce the company's business priorities and values by creating "distributed leadership"-leaders at every level who send the same messages about the company's direction.  Yet, even the most talented and energetic group can fail if they are not aligned.  Cohesive leadership teams trust one another.  They aren't afraid to engage in conflict around ideas.  Once they commit to a decision, they walk out of a meeting with a common plan of action.

ECHELON works individually with CEOs, helping them set business and personal priorities.  ECHELON also assists Boards and leadership teams with identifying the right leadership behaviors and developing the right quality of bench strength.  Major organizational changes, whether they're brought on by a new strategy, a merger, business turnaround or transformation, particularly test top management's effectiveness.  The teams that succeed lead from the front, have a clear vision and purpose, and communicate that vision clearly throughout the organization.

People

High-performance organizations routinely find people who think and act like owners-people with high aspirations who make decisions and take prompt action.  It requires companies to consider what types of people they need to succeed, selecting for skill as well as for capability and attitude.  One key to success is getting the right people in the right jobs, a discipline that ECHELON calls "leadership supply."  Companies that practice this discipline find, develop and deploy top talent in key jobs, all of the time.  They track their people to ensure that talent is deployed where it can have the most impact.  Often, that means leaving people in jobs long enough to make a difference. 

Top performers also use aligned measures and incentives to keep people pointed toward growth.  Typically, the most effective organizations avoid overloading on metrics, taking care instead to measure what matters. A few dozen key metrics will often serve to measure most of the economic value of the business, allowing management to focus clearly on company and individual performance.  ECHELON helps companies create dynamic performance-measurement systems that zero in on what really matters to the business and thus keep leaders on the right track.  In addition, ECHELON helps companies devise tailored compensation systems that will reward actions and behaviors that advance the organization's strategies and goals.

High Performance Culture

Great companies foster a passion for the business that encourages people to give their best and at the same time creates a more fulfilling workplace for the employee.  Companies with high-performance values and behaviors inspire loyalty from employees, who want to stay and be part of a team. They create advocates, who are positive about the business to customers, colleagues and recruits. They generate commitment to go the extra mile, and to do the right thing, rather than necessarily just the easy thing.

High-performance organizations don't take culture for granted; they manage it.  That's a tall order, because it requires engaging people's inherent beliefs-about the value they place on their work and contributing to a common enterprise.  High-performance cultures also show a strong capacity to change, a critical attribute since organizations must continue to evolve as strategic goals shift.  ECHELON works with clients to instill a culture that matches a firm's strategic aspirations.  ECHELON helps articulate both the desired culture and the steps required to get there, from changing behavior and incentives through more effective decision making and communication.  Although possible as a standalone exercise, this work typically is conducted as part of a larger change program or supplements a comprehensive organizational redesign.

Decision Making

Good decision making begins with clear roles and accountabilities.  People know which decisions they are responsible for, when to provide input and who is accountable for following through.  Just as important, they know what's out of their scope.

Many of the most important decisions cut across different functions.  But it's not as simple as making one person accountable and ensuring that he or she has the proper interactions.  Top performers also make sure their organizational structure is based on the sources of value in the business.  If a company's decision roles and structure are out of line with its most important sources of value, it can cripple the business.  When the roles are well-defined, however, and the organization's structure lines up with the value in the business, the speed of decision making improves along with the quality of those decisions.

ECHELON’s approach to decision making is practical and simple.  ECHELON has found that removing ambiguity and making accountability clear unleashes productivity and delivers significant payoffs.  ECHELON applies this principle to all aspects of the organization, focusing first on issues surrounding the major sources of value.

For businesses to survive, growth is an imperative, not an option.  Often the most straightforward way to increase shareholder value is top-line revenue growth, which is also usually less painful than alternative methods of value creation (such as cost reduction or changes in ownership structure).  However, for all its positive implications, achieving growth is a complex and difficult equation.  Only a small minority of companies succeed in their attempts at sustained growth.

For companies selling into mature markets, profitable growth can be a particularly tall order.  Finding creative ways to increase the size of the pie-rather than new ways to cut up the old one is the challenge facing many of today's senior managers who want to avoid a zero-sum game with competitors.  ECHELON focuses on growth in terms of revenue, cash flow, and shareholder value, all of which are needed for sustainable, profitable performance.  ECHELON understands that to grow successfully, a company must first properly define and focus on its "profitable core."

Additional growth requires that a company relentlessly pursue contiguous businesses that strengthen its core, that foster the ability to anticipate and quickly react to major industry changes, and that develop processes to eliminate or circumvent the inherent organizational inhibitors to growth.  Finally, successful growth relies heavily on management execution.  This last imperative is particularly challenging for many organizations, which is why ECHELON works to generate consensus within management by jointly developing and prioritizing growth strategies.

Core Growth

Core growth strategy helps senior managers locate and expand the strongest assets of their core businesses. Surprisingly, ECHELON has found that most core businesses don't operate at their full potential.  ECHELON’s growth strategy tools allow clients to accurately measure the capabilities within their existing business to unearth latent opportunities, and then help them build upon that potential.  Business unit strategy often reveals contiguous business opportunities that a company can pursue to strengthen its core and grow its revenues.

Growth initiatives begin with a company's accurate assessment of its core capabilities, which serve as the most solid base for future expansion.  ECHELON works with companies to precisely answer such questions as "What are your most differentiated and strategic capabilities?" and "What are your most critical product and service offerings?" Once ECHELON has mapped out a core business's true capabilities, ECHELON helps clients rank new opportunities based on market strength and revenue potential.

Growth via Acquisitions

Looking for acquisitions starts with a sound portfolio strategy.  The best acquirers carefully choose where they will invest and know what role a potential acquisition will play before they look at targets.  Research has shown that less than 30% of acquiring executives started out with an investment thesis that stood the test of time.  Successful acquirers screen candidates based on the why and the how, with a focused search that not only identifies the right targets, but also gives a head start on the strategic due diligence process.

ECHELON has screened over 10,000 companies for its financial and corporate buyer clients.  Following a review of a company's portfolio, ECHELON confirms the corporate strategy and helps create the investment thesis.  Armed with a clear investment thesis as a guide, the screening process typically follows seven steps:

• Profile all industry participants
• Identify potential sellers
• Develop a network of contacts
• Pre-qualify a list of priority investments and initiate contact
• Conduct due diligence
• Structure and negotiate the transaction
• Close and integrate

ECHELON has extensive experience helping buyers navigate strategic acquisitions to achieve maximum benefit with minimum risk.  Whatever the transactional context — exclusive discussions, wide-band auction, or public tender — ECHELON’s clients benefit from disciplined execution and unconventional thinking.  Here, too, the financial aspects — however challenging — must be seen in a context of strategy and culture.  ECHELON is adroit in dealing with these matters, as well as intricate "social" personnel issues.

Growth via Contiguous Businesses

Growth through contiguous businesses helps companies identify and rank promising opportunities for expansion that are outside, but closely related to, their core business.  Such moves offer one of the most effective ways for companies to achieve repeated bursts of new growth.  ECHELON's approach helps clients reduce the risks such moves entail by defining the core, evaluating its full potential, and determining which adjacent markets will reinforce the core and generate sustainable growth-and, just as important, which will not.

Two common mistakes derail moves into contiguous businesses: First, companies try to build on top of a weak core business; second, they overreach into new businesses that aren't truly related to their core business.  ECHELON’s tools help clients determine accurately which businesses will add the most growth and value.  Companies can assess a businesses relationship to the core business by evaluating shared customers, channels, technologies, products, and other factors.  ECHELON often recommends companies to avoid entering contiguous businesses and focus instead on strengthening their core business.

Turnaround Strategy

Turnaround strategy enables senior managers of underperforming companies to understand the critical causes of poor results, in order to stem losses and restore growth.  A well-crafted turnaround strategy leads clients to quickly achieve their full potential.  Typically, this involves removing costs, restructuring finances and redefining strategic objectives.  Turnarounds often call for building a stronger management team, making acquisitions, or devising an exit strategy.  ECHELON's experience with turnarounds has led to a data-intensive approach, which begins with a financial review of each underperforming unit.  ECHELON doesn’t assume that the existing organization should be preserved or that revenue should be protected at any cost.  Frequently, effective turnarounds require that clients hire a new management team or shrink operations to regain profitability.

ECHELON doesn't recommend across-the-board cost cuts or the elimination of all discretionary spending.  Instead, ECHELON investigates where and how a company can invest strategically or redefine its relationships to decrease spending in other ways.  Perhaps most important, ECHELON teams plan and structure their work based on the assumption that long-term projects do not necessarily lead to higher returns.  ECHELON’s work is focused on its clients' biggest issues and the best way to get results.

Venture Consulting

ECHELON uses the term “venture consulting” to refer to the services that it provides to entrepreneurial companies in the financial services industry. These companies have come to ECHELON for a series of reasons including ECHELON’s industry knowledge, consulting services, business contacts, and financing contacts.  ECHELON executives enjoy working with entrepreneurial ventures and the firm has a wealth of experience assisting startups and their management teams.

A firm's approach to cost management is one of its most important levers in achieving profitability. Cost management includes overhead optimization and benchmarking to establish best demonstrated practices.  Overhead optimization is especially important for companies facing immediate cost pressure from events such as management shakeups, customer account defection, or significant regulatory changes.  ECHELON often approaches cost reduction efforts with an "80/20" perspective (or Pareto analysis) that is deeply rooted in our culture: a belief that 80% of the benefits may frequently be derived from 20% of the subject under consideration.
ECHELON uses several tools to perform rigorous analysis of our clients' overall financial position, competitive market dynamics, activity-based costing, and cost position relative to best demonstrated practices. ECHELON has demonstrated an ability to routinely help clients discover and correct meaningful cost inefficiencies quickly.

ECHELON completes every case involving cost reduction with a thorough quantification and presentation of savings realized.

Joint Ventures and Alliances

A strategic alliance is a partnership between firms that links parts of their businesses through a balanced agreement wherein they mutually commit resources for the achievement of common objectives.  Alliances and joint ventures serve many purposes, including filling gaps in capabilities or facilitating new market entry. 

ECHELON assists clients through several stages of the joint venture process: strategy development, partner selection, deal structure, and operating implementation.  ECHELON has found that alliances go wrong most frequently due to neglect of the first stage, strategy development.  Therefore, it focuses disproportionately on ensuring that alliances are structured correctly from the outset, with a very clear, shared vision and a solid understanding of mutual economics.  At the same time, ECHELON has experience coming into an alliance after problems have appeared and supporting management on a restructuring to optimize value for both parties.

Capital Management

ECHELON focuses on reducing costs across all operations and getting the highest return on invested capital.  ECHELON also helps companies generate more revenues from its assets.  ECHELON helps clients who are owner-operators assess the attractiveness of new markets and allocate capital and improve operations to spur growth.

ECHELON’s capital management work centers on cutting operating costs in every category, aligning them with industry benchmarks, and modifying organizational structure accordingly.  By determining key drivers of returns and building critical processes around them, ECHELON improves ROIC.  ECHELON uses lifetime value analysis of customers; channel, inventory, selling and account management; and pricing tools to bolster revenue and rates of return.

Outsourcing

Strategic sourcing is the process by which organizations determine how to access the right business capability at the right cost.  Sourcing must be managed effectively across the four key dimensions of management, resources, services, and business processes.  ECHELON helps firms evaluate the outsourcing option by identifying potential savings and providing a qualitative and quantitative view of the costs and benefits.

If outsourcing is a “go,” ECHELON employs an eight-step process which handles all aspects from strategy development to post conversion performance monitoring.  With strategic sourcing, ECHELON can enable clients to ensure sourcing decisions are based on business strategy and to help develop sourcing agreements to deliver value now and flexibility for the future. 

SG&A Management

Low overhead costs are essential to profitability; often they're connected closely to industry leadership and high economic returns.  Yet eliminating excessive overhead can be tricky.  Many times, costs are "hidden" or duplicated in business units and at the corporate level.  Rapidly growing companies can lose control of costs. In mergers and acquisitions, cost reduction is frequently both a major deal promise and a disappointment.

ECHELON has helped hundreds of clients reduce SG&A costs.  ECHELON’s work here takes into account strategy and customer requirements, so resources remain focused on critical activities and employees buy in to the process.  ECHELON’s change-management skills ensure successful implementation.  

ECHELON runs each cost center through a set of diagnostics, which include comparisons with benchmarks and best practices, to find and rank opportunities for savings.  The redesign phase sets the stage for service improvement and cost reduction-often through automation, consolidation, outsourcing, and simplification.  Tracking systems ensure that results are not only on target but lasting.

To reach its full potential, a company must attain peak performance in several dimensions.  Performance improvement encompasses revenue enhancement, cost management, complexity reduction, capability sourcing and business process redesign.  Alongside a winning strategy, performance improvement is fundamental to a company's success.  ECHELON’s performance improvement work is at the heart of what it does as a firm.  ECHELON is so confident in our ability to create value that, unlike our competitors, we are willing to tie our fees to our clients' results.

ECHELON’s approach ensures that clients achieve leadership in their core business and expand thoughtfully.  Typically, ECHELON starts by using diagnostic tools, such as the revenue sieve and cost benchmarking, to identify levers for improving performance.  For the highest priorities, ECHELON defines specific goals and marries client and and ECHELON resources, using the most valuable tools and change management techniques to deliver optimal results.

Business Process Redesign

Business process redesign (BPR) examines the efficiency and effectiveness of a company's processes.  It ensures that they deliver the highest quality products and services, in the most productive way, at the appropriate prices.  BPR helps companies to beat their competition, as well as to become more innovative.  Companies can apply BPR to most aspects of their business.Typically, ECHELON’s work generates cost savings of 20 to 30 percent.  But even more advantageous are increased quality and customer satisfaction.

ECHELON works with each client to assess its operating practices and their cost and effectiveness, particularly in comparison with competitors.  ECHELON understands the demands of high growth businesses and the advantages of scale and scope.  ECHELON creates value by eliminating waste from processes, by employing IT to enhance productivity, and by making strategic use of outsourcing.

Capability Sourcing

Capability sourcing improves a company's competitive position by ensuring that processes and functions are obtained from the right source at the right cost.  If a company is not first-rate in an activity, that capability can be upgraded through internal investment, enhanced through an acquisition, and/or outsourced to a best-in-class provider.  ECHELON applies a broad strategic perspective, asking not "What should clients outsource?" but "Given that everything can be outsourced, what should they insource because they're the best at it?" ECHELON's work in capability sourcing improves clients' internal and external customer satisfaction.

An initial analysis assesses how critical each capability is to the company's strategy and identifies the highest-value opportunities for improvement.  Often the next step is to help clients fix broken processes.  If outsourcing is the best option, ECHELON helps select the right partner, design the deal, manage the transfer of the capability and set up monitoring systems.

Complexity Reduction

Offering variety to meet customers' individual needs can boost growth and profits.  So why has ECHELON shown numerous clients how to reduce their offerings?  Because too much variety (high complexity) is often a symptom of a larger problem: not understanding customers well.  By providing the right level of product variety, companies can increase sales and market share and reduce costs significantly.

Most companies look at complexity reduction as a way to lower costs, and indeed, the accompanying savings can be significant.  But the largest benefits nearly always come from achieving a better understanding of customer needs, which leads to improved customer satisfaction, faster inventory turnover, and ultimately, higher revenues and margins.

Profit Maximization

Profit maximization is a 6- to 12-month initiative focused on identifying and understanding a company's key drivers of profitability, and then designing and achieving quick-hit profit improvements.  Typically, more than half the profit uplift comes from revenue increases. The remainder comes from reducing both internal costs and supplier costs. ECHELON has worked with numerous clients to find and exploit new sources of profit. ECHELON’s focus on large opportunities that can be implemented quickly differentiates its approach.  Within weeks of starting a profit maximization project, joint client and ECHELON teams are piloting and rolling out improvements, and seeing very rapid gains to the bottom line. 

ECHELON generates ideas by brainstorming, identifying best practices, benchmarking against competitors, and drawing on its experience. After prioritizing ideas with the most profit potential and practicality, ECHELON helps implement profitability programs like new product launches, head-count reduction, and improvements to pricing and purchasing.

Front Line

One telltale sign of a high-performance organization is the engagement and focus of its front line.  Those vital employees include sales, customer service and delivery personnel-people who can turn a first meeting with a customer into a lifelong relationship.  In order to execute well, the front line needs the right back-office support, another area where effective organizations excel.

When the front line fumbles, the company is weakened-through poor service, poor quality or unnecessary cost.  Ultimately, a company's ability to execute is impaired, and customers suffer.  The key is to view the front line as a source of competitive advantage, applying the same rigor in setting it up that a company's leaders apply to the rest of the organization.  Finally, frontline employees must be equipped with the right tools, working practices, and technology to do their job effectively.

ECHELON helps clients put customers at the heart of their organizations.  As such ECHELON assists them understand their customers better, and help equip their front lines with the tools and skills needed to best serve them.  ECHELON also assists companies by designing the right corporate and functional support for front line employees.

ECHELON's deep capabilities in revenue enhancement-including customer, product and channel management; sales-force effectiveness; pricing and marketing-position it to quickly organize revenue acquisition projects across a business, and to deliver rapid results.  In this process ECHELON pinpoints where a company loses revenue, such as efforts targeting the wrong segments, inefficiencies in sales, or high customer attrition.  The process focuses on rapidly identifying ways to increase revenue. 

Customer Management

ECHELON's work in customer management starts with identifying the most valuable customer segments and proceeds to guide clients through these processes:

1. Developing or enhancing the value proposition offered to customers
2. Acquiring new customers
3. Transforming the customer experience
4. Growing the company's "share of wallet"
5. Enhancing customer loyalty and retention to increase profits

ECHELON helps companies to build customer focus into every aspect of their day-to-day business.  ECHELON supports world-class firms in their efforts to get even better at acquiring and satisfying customers.  Building on deep customer-segment analysis, ECHELON’s programs ensure that both strategy and performance improvements will align with one goal: meeting the key needs of the highest-value customers.

As an innovator in customer loyalty work, ECHELON help clients go beyond mere customer retention to realize the full lifetime potential of customers.  Customer segmentation, the process of identifying distinct groups within a company's pool of business, is the foundation of ECHELON’s approach.  All customers are not created equal.  Profit potential varies across a customer base; segmentation allows companies to allocate scarce resources where they'll deliver the highest payoff.

ECHELON begins by studying the needs of current and potential high-value customers and analyzing how a firm meets those needs.  ECHELON helps companies identify and evaluate new business opportunities, and then develop and roll out new offerings.  ECHELON also enables companies to sharpen their focus by clearly measuring how well every activity serves their target customers.  Increasingly, ECHELON works with clients to design systems that gather and manage information about customers on a continual basis, allowing them to rapidly identify and respond to changing customer needs or shifts in marketplace dynamics.

Marketing

Well-executed marketing programs drive up both revenue and profits.  Companies need to structure such programs carefully to target attractive customer segments, create the desired image and strengthen the brand.  ECHELON’s work focuses on competitive positioning, and the impact that marketing mix and resource allocation have on sales and profits.

ECHELON begins by mapping the market share and profit position of the client's products relative to its competitors. ECHELON then helps clients apply that information to manage product portfolios, from the development of strategy to tactical allocation of resources.  Properly managed, a powerful product portfolio, coupled with effective consumer and trade marketing, can be a formidable competitive weapon.

Pricing

Few levers have as much power to influence profitability as pricing does.  For a typical company, a 1 percent increase in price boosts profits two to three times as much as a 1 percent increase in sales volume.  ECHELON works with clients to improve both pricing strategy and their ability to manage pricing over the long term.  ECHELON research and analysis allows companies to quickly identify the largest pricing opportunities and tailor an approach to go after them successfully.  ECHELON’s work has helped clients gain market share, enhance their product positioning, and grow their bottom line.

ECHELON approaches pricing strategy by market, product and transaction.  ECHELON identifies how customizing prices across markets and products can affect buying behavior and differentiate offerings.  Working jointly with a client team, ECHELON defines and implements improvements to the pricing process-everything from integrating it with product design to creating financialtools to measure the impact.

Sales/Channel Management

Channel management involves more than just getting products or services from company to customer.  Like all elements of marketing and operations, it offers numerous chances to improve revenue and profitability.  Effective channels serve targeted customer segments, maximize sales, minimize cost, and provide companies a sustainable competitive advantage.

ECHELON's approach takes into account a company's value proposition to customers and overall channel strategy.  By analyzing how important different channels are to a company's total revenue, competitive positioning and profits, ECHELON prioritizes channels for enhancement.  With customer needs in mind, ECHELON helps redesign channel structure and management to enhance sales and profits.