Towards top sales organization - During the recession there are drastic differences in sales performance

Top sales performers are making a distinct difference compared to the average performers. During the recessionary times a top sales organization will increase its market share because of the best-in-class sales performance in the middle of fierce competition. At the same time the others are desperately reporting of delayed decisions making by their customers. Creating and concretizing customer value is a key success factor during the economic downturn and most of this work takes place in the sales organization.

One of the surprising changes is that also the purchasing organizations are getting more professional and systematic than ever before. The sales teams are used to segment their customers, but the same phenomenon is now taking place vice versa. Sometimes vendors are categorized based on cheapest price, and in other occasions the vendor selection criteria is set on strategic partnering capability.

The sales function may be surprised by a customer call to reduce the number of vendors, increased volumes and lower prices. On the other hand sales may face situations where the customers are aiming at a more efficient and better managed procurement function. This is a real opportunity for the sales to help the customers to make more efficient purchasing decisions, e.g. by helping the customer to recognize his real needs.

The complex b-t-b sales, in which the sales cycle is long and the customer decisions are significant, is becoming more and more team work. Quite often the account manager has to spend a lot of his time to fight over the resources within his own organization in order to align the various internal business objectives. In complex sales the actual sales teams include the technical architects, product managers, finance and service experts, legal and marketing specialists. More and more people are contributing for creating customer value and the notion of the ‘sales teams’ is getting a broader meaning.

A top performing sales organization has a good balance between four dimensions – sales strategy, sales process, sales skills and sales metrics. Top sales organizations are able to make sure that they create value to different customer segments according to customers’ expectations. At the same time sales is able to concretize this value in a way which enables them to get a better price compared to competition.

Precedo Consulting helps its customers to objectively analyze the sales performance compared to a top performing sales organization and to plan the path and concrete actions towards a top performing sales organization.

During the recent years Precedo Consulting has been supporting more than 25 significant sales transformation processes in large IT and industrial organizations. These companies operate in complex sales and their market is global. During these projects we have made in depth interviews among management team members and in addition we have interviewed more than 500 customers across Europe and trained more than 1000 sales people and technical specialists for demanding solution selling.

According to our experience the 12 major challenges is complex sales are:

1.	Have you clearly defined the customers that we want to do business with?
2.	Your segmentation model – is it too difficult to implement?
3.	Do you know how your customers segment you?
4.	Is your investment (time, resources, money) to customer relationship in balance with the investment made by your customer?
5.	Is your sales process description simple enough?
6.	Does your sales process focus on the customer and does it create value for the customer?
7.	Do the sales management tools support sales people work and are they simple enough?
8.	Can you objectively measure the sales skills?
9.	Can you objectively track the development of the sales skills?
10.	Do you train and develop those skills that are relevant in major sales?
11.	Can Sales Management evaluate the quality of the customer meetings
12.	Can you measure the value that your sales people create for customers