Lead Consultant – Supriyo Guha Roy

Client: Refineries and Process Industries

Business Context: Waste Heat Recovery SBU within a diversified conglomerate

Engagement Focus: Strategic reframing, operating-model transformation

Context

A diversified industrial company’s waste heat recovery (WHR) business was the smallest Strategic Business Unit (SBU), contributing less than 5% of turnover, with chronic stagnation and limited strategic visibility. Leadership was considering divestment due to perceived non-viability.

Challenge and Strategic Question

At the outset, the WHR SBU faced three systemic barriers:

• Product-centric positioning, focused on selling equipment rather than outcomes
• Reactive demand engagement, addressing only explicit customer inquiries
• Undiscovered customer problems, where clients did not realise that WHR solutions could help them improve energy efficiency and achieve emission reduction targets

Strategic Diagnosis

Through a structured diagnostic across customers, sales processes, and solution design capability analysis. three critical insights emerged:

• Customers did not think in terms of products; they thought in terms of energy efficiency, cost reduction, compliance, and sustainability outcomes.
• Visible demand was a fraction of the true opportunity; many potential applications of WHR were latent because customers did not recognise that solutions existed.
• The SBU’s operating model reinforced product thinking, with sales and engineering working in silos, leading with technical specifications instead of business impact.

These insights led to a reframed problem definition: the business was not suffering from a small market; it was constrained by its mental model of value creation.

Strategic Reframing and Value Proposition

The engagement pivoted the business from a product supplier to a solution architect and implementer of integrated WHR systems. The reframed value proposition emphasised:

• Outcome-led selling, with proposals rooted in measurable impact (e.g., energy cost reduction, emission reduction, ROI)
• Solution design for non-standard contexts, partnering with customers to identify opportunities they had not previously quantified
• Consultative engagement, where customer problems were diagnosed before solutions were proposed

Operating Model Alignment

To embed the strategic shift into the business’s operations, several organisational changes were introduced:

• Cross-functional solution teams: Sales and engineering were realigned into integrated units accountable for solutions, not just products
• Diagnostic-first sales processes: Initial customer engagements focused on problem diagnosis and value articulation before any technical specification work
• Capability building: Training emphasised consultative thinking, value articulation, and solution design rather than technical feature selling

These changes did not require significant capital investment; they were structural and cognitive enablers that aligned people, processes, and skills with the new strategic framing.

Outcomes and Business Impact

Over a three-year period following implementation:

• Revenue grew 20-fold, transforming the SBU from a marginal contributor to a strategic growth platform
• The business moved off the divestment agenda and gained board-level priority
• Customer engagements shifted from transactional equipment sales to long-term partnerships focused on operational and financial impact
• Internal morale and capability improved as the organisation gained confidence in its strategic clarity and market relevance

Final takeaway: Under-performance is often a symptom of constrained value framing, not constrained markets. Organisations that unlock latent demand do so by redefining how they create, articulate, and capture value, rather than by optimising existing approaches.