Baria Planning Solutions (BPS) was a publicly traded firm with $95 million annual sales. As a consulting firm, BPS provided advices of spend analysis and spend management, which helped its clients decrease cost of procurement and enhance the overall performance at every stage. Because of its first mover advantages, BPS had gained rapid growth in years before 2008. In 2007 and 2008, BPS acquired 3 firms, which served government sector, manufacturing companies and retail sector respectively. However, BPS allowed the acquired firms to operate semi-autonomously, which resulted in incompatibility among different departments, along with seasonal workload issue, both factors contributed to the decreased efficiencies, thus lowered the of overall
To make things worse, many competitors entered the industry when the economies were getting worse. Although BPS had its first mover advantages in the industry, competitions were getting more intense since more and more emerging consulting companies and large software companies had tried to enter this market. These multi-national conglomerates also consolidated with small companies to gain more local advantages, taking away some market share by attracting both existing and potential customers. Besides, most competitors in the industry had organized the sales support teams by geographic area and they hired local managers. This niche-play strategy was definitely helpful because the local managers were more familiar with the local environment, culture, demographic characteristics, etc., which helps them to access their customers easily and more efficiently control the customer services. Therefore, BPS did not have much advantage in competing with its competitors in local clients, which could affect BPS’s further development in the future.

Problem analysis of BPS In 2010, the company had an extremely bad performance in both attracting new clients and renewing existing clients. Although the number of opportunities were more than what it was initially estimated, the company’s win rate dropped from forecasted 17.5 percent to 15.5 percent, and the consistent renewal rate dropped from 91 percent to 84 percent. The main reason that contributed to