When Mercer — one of the world's largest HR consulting firms — brought us in, they had a technology problem that's surprisingly common in large enterprises: they were spending millions on technology solutions that weren't delivering results. Their sales enablement team was drowning in administrative work, case management was becoming a bottleneck, and there was a $1M technology investment on the table that we believed was entirely unnecessary.
Here's how a fractional CPO engagement identified the real problems, eliminated waste, and transformed how a Fortune 500 company operates.
The Situation
Mercer's sales enablement team was responsible for supporting thousands of consultants across the organization. Their workflow involved significant manual administrative work — data entry, report generation, case tracking, and coordination across multiple systems that didn't talk to each other.
Leadership had identified the bottleneck and proposed a solution: invest in a major new technology platform to replace the existing tools. The investment was budgeted at over $1M. A vendor had been selected. Implementation was about to begin.
That's when we got the call. Could we provide senior product and technology leadership to oversee the transition?
What we found when we arrived was different from what had been presented.
The Audit That Changed Everything
Our first step wasn't to help implement the planned technology purchase. It was to understand the actual problem.
We spent the first three weeks doing what we always do: mapping the real workflow. Not the workflow in the process documentation. The workflow that people actually followed every day. We sat with sales enablement team members, watched how they used their existing tools, and documented where they lost time.
What we found was telling:
The existing tools could do most of what the new platform promised. The problem wasn't that the current technology was incapable. The problem was that it had been poorly configured, inadequately integrated, and insufficiently adopted. Team members had developed workarounds that were less efficient than the actual features available to them.
The $1M investment would create new problems. Migrating to a new platform would mean retraining hundreds of users, migrating years of data, and temporarily losing the institutional knowledge embedded in current systems. The disruption cost alone would exceed the projected benefits for at least 18 months.
The real bottleneck was process, not technology. The administrative burden on the sales enablement team came from redundant data entry across systems that should have been integrated. They were entering the same information in three different places because nobody had built the connections between the tools they already owned.
The Solution: Integration Over Replacement
Instead of the planned $1M investment in new technology, we proposed a different approach:
Step 1: Integrate What You Have
We mapped every point where team members were entering data manually and identified which of those could be automated through integration. The existing tools — CRM, case management, reporting — all had APIs. Nobody had connected them.
We built integrations that automated data flow between the existing systems. When a consultant entered information in the CRM, it automatically populated the case management system and the reporting tools. This single change eliminated approximately 40% of the administrative work the sales enablement team was doing daily.
Step 2: Redesign the Workflow
With the integrations in place, we redesigned the sales enablement workflow to take advantage of the automation. We eliminated redundant steps, created templates for common scenarios, and built dashboards that gave team leaders visibility into caseloads and bottlenecks.
The workflow redesign wasn't just about efficiency. It was about enabling the team to take on more consultants without adding headcount. By streamlining how cases were managed, each team member could handle a 30% larger caseload.
Step 3: Build a Real Technology Roadmap
The original technology investment had been proposed without a comprehensive understanding of what the existing tools could do. We built a technology roadmap that started with the capabilities already available, identified genuine gaps, and planned targeted investments to fill those gaps over time.
This roadmap was adopted by leadership because it was grounded in observed reality, not vendor promises. Every recommendation was tied to a specific workflow problem we had documented and a measurable outcome we could track.
The Results
The engagement delivered outcomes that exceeded what the original $1M investment had promised:
- $1M saved by eliminating the planned technology investment that wasn't needed
- 40% reduction in administrative tasks through integration and automation
- 30% increase in consultant caseloads through workflow optimization
- Technology roadmap adopted by leadership and guiding ongoing improvements
Why This Happens at Enterprise Scale
The Mercer situation isn't unique. We see this pattern in large organizations regularly, and it usually has the same root causes:
Vendor-driven technology decisions. As Gartner's research on enterprise technology spending consistently highlights, enterprise technology vendors are sophisticated. They sell to executives who experience pain but don't understand the details of the workflows causing it. The pitch is compelling: replace everything with our integrated platform. But the reality is more nuanced — most organizations already own technology capable of solving their problems if properly configured and integrated.
Missing product leadership. Large organizations often lack senior product leadership that can bridge the gap between technology capabilities and business processes. IT departments understand the technology. Business units understand their needs. But nobody owns the translation between the two. That gap is where wasteful technology investments happen.
Sunk cost avoidance. Once an organization has invested time in vendor selection, it takes courage to stop and question whether the investment is necessary. Nobody wants to be the person who delayed a project that leadership had already approved. A fractional CPO brings the objectivity and seniority to challenge assumptions without political risk.
What This Means for Your Organization
If your enterprise is planning a major technology investment, here are the questions worth asking before you sign:
Have you mapped the real workflow? Not the documented process — the actual daily reality. If you haven't watched your team work for a week, you don't understand the problem well enough to buy a solution.
Can your existing tools do more? According to Forrester's research, most enterprise software is used at 20-30% of its capability. Before buying new tools, understand what the ones you own can actually do. Integration and configuration are almost always cheaper than replacement.
What's the disruption cost? Every technology migration has a hidden cost: retraining, data migration, lost productivity during transition, and the institutional knowledge that doesn't transfer. Factor this into your ROI calculation honestly.
Who is translating between technology and business? If the answer is "the vendor," you have a problem. You need someone whose incentive is your outcome, not the sale. That's where senior product leadership — whether full-time or fractional — makes the difference.
If you're facing a technology investment decision and want an objective assessment before you commit, book a strategy call. We'll give you an honest evaluation of whether you need new technology or better use of what you already have.
Further Reading
- Mercer Case Study — the metrics at a glance
- Fractional CPO Services — how we provide senior product leadership
- How Much Does a Fractional CTO Cost? — pricing and engagement models