Successfully enter, cultivate, and develop markets
There is a general view in B2B that international business involves selling the same product in different countries. It sounds simple, but this involves dealing with a wide range of countries, sectors, and products. As the level of complexity increases, management loses its steering ability.
More and more companies recognize the potential of a comprehensive professionalization of their sales activities. They are increasingly establishing centralized units to coordinate and promote the holistic and company-wide development of sales – so-called sales excellence development.
Typical challenges
- Local sales units act independently and with no strategic coordination.
- In view of increasing cost pressure, sales units need to justify their existence.
- Performance gaps are emerging between units that are successful and those that are underperforming.
Our approach to supporting you
Depending on the objective and scope of your project, we will work with you over a period of 2 to 6 months to develop a customized professionalization concept for your sales organization. To this end, the desired focal points will be defined in close consultation with top management and global sales managers and will thereafter be realized by a project team formed from your employees.
Results
- Creation of a uniform understanding of sales excellence within the company.
- Implementation of learning platforms to promote the knowledge transfer within the sales organization.
- Development of an effective KPI cockpit to ensure performance-based incentivization and measurement of success.
In view of the increasingly global nature of marketing activities, international sales is a decisive element of success. Effectively structuring global sales organization presents a number of challenges to many suppliers. The main problem is finding the right way to overcome the existing distance (between countries, cultures, and mentalities) and dealing with differences in infrastructure, market share, and positioning.
Typical challenges
- Conflicting objectives between headquarters and local country organizations unnecessarily consume resources.
- There is no primary organizational principle in international customer management (e.g. customers, countries, departments) for the company as a whole to focus on.
- Changes in the international business trigger a chain reaction of soft and country-specific factors (e.g. reaction of customers or branches) that cannot be quantified in advance.
Our approach to supporting you
Based on the starting point at your company, we will evaluate the status quo in order to identify potential levers for optimizing your international sales approach. Afterwards, we will define a roadmap for implementation and select the most pressing chains of activities together with you. Depending on the objective and scope of your project, we will support you over a period of 3 to 12 months.
Results
- Donceptualization of an effective sales organization for international business that effectively combines the strengths of both local and central sales.
- Evaluation of the most promising opportunities for tapping new or penetrating existing markets.
- Ensuring an integrated sales network with appropriate partners, channels, and services.
Increasingly diverse and numerous tasks with constant or decreasing resources heighten the complexity in sales. The result is that companies might miss out on business without realizing it. If suppliers are able to effectively align their sales organization and its resources with all of the tasks and necessary room for flexibility, then sales will become an engine of success for the company.
Typical challenges
- Companies are less and less able to exploit new business opportunities while simultaneously increasing their sales performance.
- Instead of correctly aligning tasks and resources in sales, tough competition is rashly cited as an excuse for failure.
- Overburdened members of the sales team tend to place enormous demands on their own organization and delegate problems with customers to internal units.
Our approach to supporting you
To help you exploit the full potential of your sales organization, we will use a comprehensive assessment to localize the internal and external drivers of complexity at your company. Based on this assessment, we will develop suitable scenarios to reduce sales complexity. Working together with senior management, we will then define a tailored approach for managing complexity.
Results
- Identification of drivers of complexity within the sales organization and localization of the most effective levers.
- Optimal alignment of the degree of specialization of the sales team (specialists vs. generalists) for the desired market task.
- Establishment of central initiatives to ensure optimal collaboration among all sales units and long-term performance management.
