Sales in the industry is facing numerous challenges: international sourcing is leading to a harmonization of offers, price pressure is increasing and sales have generally not been changed in the last 15 years. As a result, salespeople are hardly digitized and many internal processes are still carried out manually. Our client was faced with the challenge that a new management team had taken over and it was necessary to gain a precise understanding of the initial situation in sales.
A sales excellence assessment was carried out in collaboration with CustomersX®. This identified the key weaknesses and potential from the perspective of employees and customers in order to focus on increasing growth and profits. The result was a very reliable decision-making basis for those responsible. On the one hand, it became clear that increasing competition was to be expected in an important market. Secondly, the systematic analysis of the success factors of Sales Excellence identified the specific strengths and weaknesses of the sales system. This gives the new management team the opportunity to make targeted improvements to sales in the coming months.
At a glance
30%
Customer Value-based Decision Making
0%
Customer-centric transformation
70%
Co-creation
0%
Customer Management
The full story on distribution in the industry
In many companies, the sales department is rarely changed. This was the case for our customer. Many processes become established over the years, existing skills are consolidated and it is easy to get the impression that everything is going according to plan. However, industries are always affected by change and are characterized by increasingly tough competition. The biggest challenge here is not sales, but the mindset that has usually been cultivated over decades. Sales systems that have not been changed for years can usually only be transformed at great expense. This creates a major risk for the company and a high potential for frustration for the employees. Our client had also not made any changes or provided any training in sales for years. When profits and growth stagnated, attempts were made to counteract this by cutting costs and increasing pressure. However, they were not successful. The realization matured that the sales system should be systematically adapted to the new reality and that changes should be made more continuously in the future.
Based on our DTC approach , we developed a project approach to introduce sales excellence as a management competence in the company. The aim was to understand exactly where the priorities should be set in terms of change from a customer and employee perspective in order to improve sales in the industry.
The first step was to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the existing sales system using our Sales Excellence approach. An external survey of customers was conducted for this purpose. This made it possible to determine the key value drivers and develop a focused improvement approach. We recommend the use of Sales Excellence in practice because there are many “construction sites” in sales in particular due to the lack of systematic further development. This can easily lead to those responsible getting bogged down. Sales Excellence allows for an in-depth understanding and, building on this, a clear focus.
What skills do you need in sales?
In a second step, the sales employees were surveyed. This allowed the internal perspective to be compared with the customers’ assessment. This revealed numerous insights that will be important for a successful transformation.
For example, the importance of additional services was completely underestimated by management and sales. Customers stated that additional services now have the same importance in the customer’s selection process as the actual products. The range of services was also unknown to most customers. While the sales department was quite critical of its customer acquisition and customer value enhancement skills, customers had already come to terms with this. New potentials were no longer even presented, but rather distributed directly to the competition. Sales and customers had made themselves comfortable. As the offers were less and less convincing, sales had increasingly taken on a service function. Although this pleased the customers, it was not an ideal solution from a cost perspective. The surveys also showed that the company hardly had sufficient expertise in any of the sales excellence dimensions. It is very easy to make the mistake here of tackling too many points through actionism and blocking the organization.
In summary, a systematic sales excellence analysis provides a value-oriented decision-making basis for sales optimization. It generates information that is usually not available in companies. A systematic analysis is highly recommended, especially because so many companies have a massive investment backlog in sales. This ensures that growth and profits can be increased in a targeted manner during a subsequent transformation. This is extremely helpful in industrial sales.
* We take confidentiality with our customers seriously. The name has been changed, the results are real.
