Veolia Drives $289M in Influenced Opportunities Through Consultative Selling

The Challenge

Veolia is a global leader in environmental solutions, operating through three key business units: Water, Waste, and Energy. With nearly 218,000 employees worldwide, Veolia designs and provides sustainable solutions that help cities and industries manage resources more efficiently.  

Following a merger and evolving market dynamics, the organization recognized the need to unify its sales process, establish a common selling language, and effectively acquire new customers in an evolving marketplace. At the same time, sellers navigated increasingly complex buying environments involving multiple stakeholders across technical, legal, and operational roles. While the team possessed strong technical expertise, they needed a more consistent approach to uncovering customer pain, aligning stakeholders, and advancing opportunities through the buying process. 

To support these goals, Veolia sought a partner that could help embed a more agile, process-driven sales methodology while ensuring measurable behavior change and commercial impact. Additionally, they sought a partner that could support global delivery and offer robust tools for measuring impact.  

The Approach

Veolia partnered with Richardson to implement the Consultative Opportunity Pursuit® framework (formerly Sprint Selling) across its global salesforce – focusing on agility, behavior change, and real-world application.

Key initiatives included: 

• A structured learning path starting with pre-workshop modules via digital learning platform to build foundational knowledge. 
• Customized coach-led workshops with Sprint Selling at the core, tailored by region to meet diverse commercial needs. 
• Ongoing capability-building through sales workflow tools and additional training to close skill gaps. 
• Integration of core sales tools into CRM, including Score Opportunities, Plan Your Call, and Reflect & Coach, to support daily execution. 
• A five-level measurement framework grounded in the Kirkpatrick model to evaluate reaction, knowledge, behavior, pipeline impact, and business results. 
• Focus groups to gather feedback, assess real-time impact, and gather business cases.  

Through 99 workshops involving 1255 participants, sellers developed the skills needed to: 

• Diagnose and quantify customer pain
• Engage diverse stakeholders and access decision-makers
• Use Collaboration Plans to align customers on next steps
• Position differentiated value during complex sales conversations

The initiative also incorporated ongoing reinforcement through Accelerate assessments and QuickCheck proficiency tools, enabling teams to measure knowledge improvement and reinforce learning over time. 

As a result, Veolia sellers began applying consultative questioning, stakeholder alignment techniques, and collaboration planning to advance opportunities that previously had stalled. 

The Results

Within 24 months of implementation, Veolia influenced $289M in opportunities through Consultative Opportunity Pursuit workshops. Measurement efforts and feedback sessions revealed significant commercial improvements:  

• 13% increase in opportunities created post-training 
• 32% increase in closed-won opportunities 
• 37% decrease in closed-lost opportunities 

Customer Perspective

"I used Consultative Opportunity Pursuit during a customer review meeting to find where the pain lies. They admitted it and went with us despite the higher cost” 

“An issue we had caused a stop for weeks. Consultative Opportunity Pursuit helped us advanced through this issue” 

“Consultative Opportunity Pursuit taught me to continually go deeper; to truly understand the pain of the customer. We won an additional 30k on the opportunity”