In his new book, Strategic Customer Management, Professor Nigel Piercy from Warwick Business School, champions the role of Sales in the business hierarchy when he writes:
For many companies, the strategic management of customers & customer relationships has become a higher priority than conventional marketing activities… The challenge is to reposition sales as a core part of a company’s competitiveness, where the sales organisation is closely integrated into a company’s business strategy.
So why has the sales function suddenly become more important, rather than being seen as just a poor relation of Marketing, hidden away in one of the 4P’s?
Possibly as a realisation that the most important relationships are those the business has with its customers and that it is the sales organisation, particularly in the b2b arena, that is the key area where these relationships take place.
What is Strategic Sales?
Given that most customers can now serve themselves online or by telephone, organisations should now target resources on those important customers that provide them with most of their existing business and nurture those that promise to be equally important in the longer term.
This is the arena of Strategic Sales and requires a number of interlinking elements to ensure both the Creation and the Management of a strategic sales organisation.
The Strategic Sales Value Chain below, illustrates all the elements involved in Creating and Managing Strategic Sales.
Creating Strategic Sales
There are three essential elements for Creating Strategic Sales.
The Value Proposition
This represents the entire scope of the organisation’s total product & service offering & how this forms the basis of the organisation’s unique value proposition & competitive positioning.
Customer Strategy
This reflects the understanding of customers, their requirements and expectations, relative importance & how they make buying decisions.
Sales Process
The insights gained from the development of the value proposition & from an understanding of customers, should be reflected in how the sales organisation engages with customers and specify whether activity management or account planning is appropriate.
Managing Strategic Sales
The Strategic Sales Value Chain then identifies those elements for Managing Strategic Sales to give sales strategy the best possible environment in which to succeed.
Vision & Mission
These elements recognise the key sales management role in providing the leadership and direction for the sales organisation as a whole.
People & Performance
This element specifies the people required to implement the sales strategy, together with nature of the performance required to be judged successful.
Motivation & Development
This final element ensures that sales management provides the necessary support to create a high performance sales organisation with highly motivated individuals and teams.
Implications for the Organisation
In this strategic sales environment, salespeople will need to be better educated and better trained to relate to customers in a more strategic way. They will develop specific value propositions for individual customers and need the necessary internal clout to ensure their own organisations deliver on customer requirements and expectations.
These strategic sales assets need to be managed in a more enlightened way, as the old command and control systems will fail miserably to inspire and motivate such people.
Finally, there will need to be more emphasis on recruitment, motivation, coaching, training and team development in order to foster the necessary supporting environment for strategic sales professionals to flourish and to deliver what customers really want.
Rennie Gould
Customize, June 2010
