Hbr's 10 Must Reads on Sales With Bonus Interview of Andris Zoltners (9781633693289) by Harvard Business Review (COR)

Author:Harvard Business Review (COR) [Harvard Business Review]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633693289
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2017-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Support the sales force in executing the plays

For a micromarket strategy to succeed, the sales training has to be experiential. Salespeople should engage with the opportunity maps that reveal hot (and cool) micromarkets in a given geography and test their intuition against hard data. (It can be eye-opening for them to discover that data analysis is often superior to anecdote in this realm.) Training should also allow them to act out and hone the recommended sales plays. Not only does this hands-on engagement help win over sales reps, but it’s a much more effective teaching method than lectures or demonstrations.

In addition to interactive training, reps will need direct coaching on specific pitches. To this end, several leading companies have created in-house “win labs” in which sales and marketing experts help reps craft their pitches. (The opportunity map, devised early in a micromarket analysis, provides invaluable information because it reveals drivers of demand: what makes a given customer buy.) Salespeople are required to bring their pitch plans to the win lab—usually virtually—and the lab team provides data, insights, and value-proposition collateral about the market or similar customers that the rep can use to create a sales play for a specific customer.

For example, our chemicals company produced pitch packs for each industry it served. The packs were further customized for the decision maker with whom the sales rep would interact. “Previously my documents looked like chicken scratch,” one rep eloquently put it. “Now I have slick, tailored materials ranging from a four-page summary for the factory manager to a more in-depth technical document for the R&D manager.”

Obviously, supporting the sales team to execute on micromarket strategies is not a onetime effort; management must create ongoing support capabilities. For instance, at the air cargo company, management developed a simple performance dashboard to help reps manage pricing and volume negotiations with large customers by route, time, capacity, and competition. The dashboard includes critical real-time information, such as whether the specific flight is overbooked, as well as information on the weekly itineraries of the airline and its competitors. The sales manager holds weekly sales strategy discussions with each rep to ensure that he or she is well positioned to negotiate the best deals. This effort has generated an average increase in share of wallet as high as 20% to 50% with key customers.

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