Digital Transformation Driving 37% Sales Productivity Improvement
Grew sales per employee 37% over five years by shifting technology and solutions to 32% of total revenue.
Securitas, a Large Enterprise Security Services company, created value through Sales Efficiency.
Securitas AB, the Sweden-headquartered global security services company, generated approximately SEK 101.5 billion (~$9.9 billion) in annual revenue in FY2018 with over 370,000 employees across 58 countries. The company's sales process was heavily manual and relationship-driven: branch managers doubled as salespeople, client data lived in disconnected local systems, and there was no standardized sales methodology across markets. Technology and solutions — higher-margin electronic security, monitoring, and integrated security systems — represented only 20% of total revenue, with the remaining 80% coming from lower-margin guarding services. The sales force lacked the tools and data to effectively cross-sell technology solutions to existing guarding clients, leaving significant revenue on the table.
Between 2018 and 2023, Securitas executed a digital transformation of its sales operations as part of its five-year strategy:
| Metric | 2018 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Group sales | SEK 101.5B | SEK 157.2B |
| Technology & solutions share | — | 32% of revenue |
| Sales per employee | Baseline | +37% (IMD study) |
| Operating margin | Baseline | +70bps |
Sales productivity figure from IMD Business School client impact study; arithmetic from published annual reports yields approximately 57% revenue-per-employee growth over the same period.
Securitas invested over SEK 2 billion in the Freedom IT program and deployed a unified Client Excellence Platform combining CRM, service delivery, and client lifecycle management. The 37% sales productivity improvement did not come from deploying a CRM tool in isolation. It came from redesigning the entire client lifecycle: how leads were qualified, how proposals were built, how service delivery was tracked, and how renewals were managed. Most services companies deploy CRM and get nothing from it because they connect a new front-end to the same fragmented back-end processes.
The Stanley Security acquisition added 13,700 technology-specialized sales professionals who fundamentally changed what Securitas could sell. Cultural change in a 341,000-person organization that employs security guards requires external injection of a different selling model. Internal retraining of guards to sell technology solutions works at the margin. Bringing in a salesforce that has only ever sold electronic security systems changes the baseline capability. The CRM improved efficiency; the acquisition expanded the addressable product set.
The critical constraint this case illustrates: technology-enabled selling improvements compound only when the underlying product has a higher margin to capture. Securitas needed the technology and solutions mix shift (32% of revenue, 53% of operating profit) to accompany the productivity gains. Efficiency improvements on low-margin guarding contracts do not compound in the way efficiency improvements on technology and monitoring contracts do. The platform investment and the M&A investment had to happen together for either to reach its full value.
Bundling Physical Security with Technology and Remote Monitoring
Product Mix Shift to Digital and Recurring Revenue Services
Margin Expansion Through Cash Management Automation and Service Bundling