We’ve worked with several clients on elements of their sales strategy, which clearly define who you are selling to, what you are selling, how you are selling, and why you are different -- all to support better returns for the sales organization (Revenues – Cost of Sales). Asking fundamental questions like these begin to point to significant gaps and opportunities around sales structure and alignment.
While decisions related to sales strategy, model, and structure are highly unique to an organization, we find that investigating four core areas -- what we call the 4 C's of sales strategy -- can help guide those decisions:
- Customer – How do you segment customers based on size, potential, needs, capacity, location, etc? Which are your highest priority segments?
- Coverage – Based on what you learned in customer analyses, how should you define your coverage model to best align with your highest value segments?
- Capacity – What is the workload required to sell and service customers and how do we size/resource our team (and selling roles within it) accordingly?
- Capability – What competencies do our people need in order to engage in the right conversations with different levels of customers, which for many companies span strategic/consultative selling to tactical selling?
We unpack these decisions in our comprehensive Guide to Sales Resource Optimization. By examining each of these areas, a sales organization can maximize both selling efficiencies (e.g., reducing overlapping resources, reducing T&E, and expanding the “bag” of solutions) and sales effectiveness (e.g., more value for the customer through broader solutions, better experience through single point of contact).