A Commercial Excellence and (profitable) Growth Practitioner, Strategist and Coach
+61 448 839 711
Alex.Grell@LeadersOnDemand.com
With almost three decades' experience of major European and Asia Pacific markets, Alex has led large, diverse B2B Sales, Marketing and Customer Success teams. This experience has lent itself to Alex leading (or playing integral roles in) large wholesale Sales and Marketing transformations.
He is a practitioner of, and Coach-accredited in, numerous Commercial Excellence disciplines and methodologies. These include Sales Go-to-Market planning, Strategic Account Program development, Sales and Marketing Operating Model design and governance, capability assessment, sales process design and standardisation, use of tools and reporting.
Alex is also a specialist in: Enterprise Account Management; Strategic Opportunity Management (deal strategy and orchestration of large, complex sales opportunities); Pricing & Negotiation strategy and Interpersonal Skills & Social Styles modelling.
Career History
Before joining Leaders on Demand, Alex was the Regional Vice President, Strategic Pursuits for Salesforce. In what was a newly created role, Alex led several transformational sales opportunities, whilst also building scale in pursuit capability, processes, tools and governance across the ANZ business, through the creation of a Strategic Pursuits Centre of Excellence (CoE).
Large-scale sales change and transformation in the professional services industry characterise Alex’s career the decade prior, where Alex led: sales capability development and sales and marketing operating model design projects as a management consultant for Blackdot (a Customer Growth Consultancy, now part of EY); a global sales and marketing transformation for law firm, Ashurst; a brand transformation as President of an Asia Pacific not-for-profit professional services industry body (ICON APAC); and a Strategic Pursuits business change program over many years for global consultancy, EY, as the Asia Pacific Strategic Pursuits team lead based in Hong Kong.
Growth-driven start-ups and scale-ups lay the foundation to the first 15-years of Alex’s career. He was a salesperson tasked with winning new logos for specialist financial and performance management consultancy, Kurt Salmon (now Accenture Strategy), a firm focused on the CFO agenda, and two IT research and advisory firms providing decision support to CIOs in Europe and Australia. Alex started his career with ThomsonReuters, where he was responsible for new market entry into the German speaking parts of Europe with global investment banks.
Leadership Highlights
Developed the Salesforce ANZ 'big bets' strategy, operating model and go-to-market plan to drive focused resourcing and investment decisioning in parallel with transactional, run rate business; standardised pursuit methodologies and operationalised a proprietary sales process to mature ways of working and improve sales efficiency and effectiveness.
Executed a successful industry and client segmentation strategy delivering 75% of global revenues for Ashurst; developed and led the Global BD&M transformation blueprint focused on industry verticalisation, innovation and commercial capability development.
Built an EY Asia Pursuits team from scratch that captured significant market share from Assurance incumbents in China and South Korea, delivering hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and changing the way the partnerships invested in pursuits for the longer term; built an offshore Pursuits function in India to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of onshore resources; led a new logo win of a 12-strong global consortium on the world's largest infrastructure opportunity in Asia and co-led the penetration and expansion into a previously untapped Hong Kong infrastructure market; led the global Pursuits innovation and transformation project to innovate and disrupt pursuits at scale, from transactional to large scale opportunities.
Delivered a wholesale Association rebrand, expanded sector orientation, functional capability and geographical coverage, on a limited budget with a 12-strong Board and 9 Committees comprised exclusively of volunteers across multiple geographies as President of ICON APAC.
In all positions of influence, I have successfully reset and retained 50/50 gender balance in my leadership teams and have been an active coach and mentor to many up and coming female Sales and Marketing leaders.
Qualifications
BA (Hons); Miller Heiman, Target Account Selling (TAS), Strategy - The Art of Winning (leveraging Sun Tzu’s Art of War Strategy), Corporate Executive Board’s Challenger Sale; Major Opportunity Readiness Assessment & Evaluation (MORE); Holden’s Powerbase Selling, SPIN, Kellogg Professor, Victoria Medvec’s Negotiation training; Tracom Social Styles modelling, Stanford d.school Human Centred Design.
Sectors
Alex is an industry-agnostic who has worked across many industry sectors over the course of his career. Alex does however have deeper specialisation in B2B environments, particularly in Professional Services, Financial Services and Technology.
Functions
Primary functions include Sales and Business Development, secondary functions in Marketing and Communications
Situations
Enterprise-wide transformation in the Growth / Sales domains, particularly for companies looking to mature and uplift sales sophistication through Sales Strategy, go-to-market and Operating Model design, governance, capability development, process design and some tools (CRM, Altify Opportunity Manager)
Favourite quotes
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle” Sun Tzu
“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women” Groucho Marx
“I joined Leaders on Demand...
... to be part of, and learn from, a highly diverse and experienced community of senior professionals, seeking to impart the experience of things done well, and things that went... not so well”
“When I'm not at work...
... I enjoy competing in triathlons and train with my wife and two boys. I am a keen cyclist, a soccer fan and Arsenal aficionado and enjoy watching rugby (union and league) and my boys playing basketball. I am fluent in French (handy with a French wife) and German (helpful with an Austrian family!)”