Carpe Argentum"
(or ‘seize the revenue’)
By Stan Martin, CEO, Adroit Consulting
Cont'd from page 1
Don’t just work hard. Work together.
To effectively drive top-line growth – to go out and find the business rather than waiting for it to come knocking - requires a new way of thinking about sales effectiveness. This new thinking incorporates collaborative execution. Today, most companies touch their customers through a variety of channels and resources, some of whom are quite independent. There is real economic and strategic value to such multi-channel distribution strategies. The front line in the battle for market share and customer retention comprises the direct sales force, the inside sales team, customer service, channel partners, and technologies such as the Web, telephony, and CRM. The customer experience, which is often the critical driver of revenue generation and growth, is shaped by all of these functional areas and touch points.
Yet in most enterprises there are solid boundaries between these organizational functions – walls that make it difficult to assess the complete customer experience and even more difficult to optimize it. Most often, failures in execution result from operational breakdowns between these internal functions – not from market or sales force issues.
Do you believe that in your markets, even in tough economic times, “the business is out there, if you will do what it takes to go after it?” If so, it is important to recognize that to follow our dictum – carpe argentum – is not merely a matter of working harder and moving faster, of holding sales rallies or orchestrating the Sizzling Summer Giveaway contest. It is about integrated execution.
A manufacturing company recently decided to re-build their inside sales function to work more collaboratively with the field and their channel sales organizations. By carefully architecting the work processes and interaction points between these areas they were able to transition a significant amount of territory to the inside sales teams and focus the field on larger, more strategic accounts and higher-yielding territories. They were even able to re-allocate resources from under-performing areas. Their objective was to focus all sales channels on proactively seizing more business. The success of the initiative was heavily dependent on an integrated approach. Such an approach could only be achieved by integrating work processes and aligning metrics and goals.
Some companies develop an integrated go-to-market capability even during the boom times, but many more take the easier path, and now face greater urgency in streamlining and integrating their investments if they are to successfully locate and retain business. To grow in difficult times, or to accelerate growth in good times, requires collaboration among channels, touch points, marketing, sales and service functions. To leave it to a single function – such as Sales or Marketing – is to adopt a 4-cylinder approach in an 8-cylinder world.
Field sales must be focused on high-yield or strategic activities suited to their high-level skills and higher cost structure. To do so, they must work with, not over, Inside Sales, who in turn must be re-focused on selling rather than merely servicing and fulfilling. Customer Service must accept its role as a high-frequency touch point to the market, and meet service levels necessary to maximize the customer experience while supporting cross-sell and up-sell approaches. Service must also realize that they hear, and must share with other corporate stakeholders, a vast quantity of information about their customers. In businesses where marketing has a tactical revenue-generation role, they too must operate under the same integrated game plan. Finally, tools and automation exist to serve these business plans and strategies and make them more efficient – as enablers rather than as ‘silver bullets’.
To ‘seize the revenue,’ all of these functions must establish and operate coordinated processes and be jointly focused on selling and servicing, and sharing knowledge of what it will take to gain the next point of share or the next dollar of revenue.
© 2003 Adroit Consulting
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