A future-state operating model for North America sales and service operations.
One surface where leadership could sequence transformation investments against each other.
Sodexo's Acceler8 program was a North America–wide operations and growth initiative spanning the full sales-to-service lifecycle. The ask, on paper, was sales effectiveness: how to grow North America revenue with the existing team. In practice, the work was a service-design problem disguised as a sales problem. An operations model whose role definitions, lifecycle phases, and account tiers had drifted out of phase with how Sodexo's strategy team wanted to deploy talent, pricing, and offers.
Zenda was engaged to design the future-state operating model. As Senior Design Consultant, I co-designed an integrated four-layer artifact: role map, lifecycle architecture, account-tier framework, and team-emotion process view. The artifact gave Sodexo's North America leadership a single surface for sequencing transformation investments against each other.
Goals
Outcomes the leadership team agreed the operating model had to make possible.- Map the current state across roles, lifecycle phases, and account tiers as a single integrated system.
- Identify the friction points where the operating model was hardest to operate, not just where it was slowest.
- Design a future-state model that strategy, sales, service, and talent leadership could argue against together in the same room.
- Surface the operational trade-offs leadership was making implicitly, so they could be sequenced explicitly.
- Deliver a future-state levers set leadership could use to drive targeting, pricing, offers, retention, and talent decisions.
Approach
Discovery mapped the existing North America operation across three structural dimensions, then a fourth emotional one.The discovery work mapped Sodexo's existing North America operations across three dimensions, then a fourth one most operating-model exercises ignore.
Underneath the structural mapping was an emotional one. Account teams routinely operated in conditions of structural ambiguity. Whose call is this? The cost of that ambiguity wasn't visible in the operational dashboard. It was showing up in team energy, customer-handoff quality, and the small daily decisions about where to spend the next hour.
The places the system was hardest to operate were the places the experience, both employee and customer, was quietly degrading. Diagnostic finding · Sodexo Acceler8 · discovery
The brief said sales effectiveness. The diagnosis said service design. The work was naming the difference and giving leadership a surface to act on it.
A sales-effectiveness brief that turned out to be a service-design problem. The team-emotion layer is what made the artifact a decision-making tool, not a service blueprint.
Solution
A future-state operating model designed across four interlocking layers, with a strategic levers framework layered on top.The future-state operating model was designed across four interlocking layers, with a strategic levers framework layered on top. Each layer was independently legible. Together, they made the trade‑offs explicit.
Role map
The 15+ functional roles were plotted against accountability, decision rights, and handoff geometry. The output was a responsibility surface, not an org chart, that named ownership and trade-offs explicitly.
Lifecycle architecture
The 11 phases were rendered as a system rather than a sequence, with parallels, dependencies, and deliberate non-linearities named explicitly. Phases were now testable against each other.
Account-tier framework
The three account tiers were mapped against the lifecycle, against the roles, and against the resourcing model, so the tier conversation could happen as part of the operating-model conversation rather than alongside it.
Team-emotion process view
A process view that surfaced where the system was hardest to operate, not just where it was slowest. This was the layer that turned the artifact from a service blueprint into a decision-making tool. Leadership could see the friction. They could trade against it on purpose.
The future-state levers set
Targeting, pricing, offers, retention, and talent, rendered as a single surface for the leadership team to sequence transformation investments against each other. Pulling one lever had a visible cost in the others. Decisions could now be made on purpose rather than negotiated in retrospect.
Pulling one lever had a visible cost in the others. Decisions could now be made on purpose rather than negotiated in retrospect. Levers framework · Sodexo Acceler8 future-state model
Outcomes
What shipped, and what the artifact let leadership do next.- A single operating-model artifact that strategy, sales, service, and talent leadership could argue against together in the same room.
- A future-state levers framework that made trade‑offs explicit at the leadership level: targeting, pricing, offers, retention, talent.
- A team-emotion process view that legitimized operational truths the dashboard couldn't capture.
- A research-anchored case for the human layer inside a sales transformation that, on the brief, had been framed as a sales-effectiveness problem.
Additional work
Two flagship engagements from the same period. The process travels.Redesigning how a Fortune 50 governs its master data
HCD research across five international sites. 200+ finance stakeholders synthesized. An operating model and smart-form UX that consolidated five submission channels into one RACI-governed workflow.
A 66-slide future-state vision delivered at CFO level
HCD research for Long-Term Planning and Monthly Business Review. The Four Pillars framework embedded structurally. GTN close-cycle target from 3 days to 0.5 days, drawn from a peer-function baseline.
Talk to Ben about your work
Operating-model questions tend to come in disguised.
Most of the engagements that look like sales problems, product problems, or process problems turn out to be operating-model problems wearing a different brief. If that's where you are, the conversation starts here.