George Lagone, Principal

George is a Principal at Axiom Consulting Partners. He brings to the firm nearly two decades of experience working with business leaders to drive revenue growth and improve commercial performance.

At Axiom, George partners with clients on sales effectiveness, developing growth strategies, deployment of sales teams, operating models, incentive compensation, and sales talent strategy. He leads sales effectiveness engagements with clients at all levels of maturity and growth – from long-established, publicly-traded, large-cap companies to early-stage technology startups.

Working at Axiom allows me to deliver on the promise that many consulting firms make, but few truly fulfill – to leverage cutting-edge data science capabilities to produce superior, differentiated insights and solutions for our clients.

Experience

Prior to joining Axiom Consulting Partners, George was Director of Sales Effectiveness at Fiserv, a global leader in payments and Fintech.  Before joining Fiserv, George spent nearly two decades leading client engagements that delivered measurable commercial improvement for the Sales Force Effectiveness practices at Korn Ferry Hay Group, ZS Associates, and Deloitte.

George’s career highlights include:

• Go-to-Market Transformation – led sales role rationalization, sales force re-sizing, and territory alignment for a global travel industry client. Also defined new operating model/structure and sales roles to better manage existing customers and foster more new business development. His work was part of a top-down transformation of the client’s entire sales function which resulted in $7.5M of direct cost reduction and $80M of incremental sales.
• Omnichannel Retail Sales Incentives – developed a novel sales incentive structure to align an in-store sales force’s behavior around a targeted omnichannel experience for a leading portfolio of retail brands. Designed and administered sales incentive pilots to identify the most effective way to drive sales and customer engagement across multiple brands.
• Strategic Account Management – led design and implementation of a global strategic account management program for a PE-backed industrial testing client, which resulted in 42% YoY revenue growth for SAM accounts. Embedded two teams with the client to create SAM team structures, define roles, select talent, perform account planning, and monitor several pilot programs.
• Channel Definition – increased revenue from top accounts by 40% for a $1.2B industrial supply wholesaler by re-segmenting the customer base and reducing the number field rep-covered accounts by 35%. Reduced cost of sales 25% for remaining accounts by shifting to inside sales team coverage.

George earned his MBA from the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and his BS in Computer Science from DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois. He is also a WorldatWork Certified Sales Compensation Professional (CSCP).