Sales Structure Re-Design

Common Problem: Your sales culture is reactive (rather than proactive)
Does your sales organization:

Wait for the phone to ring?
Find little time to prospect for new business?
Get surprised by changes to their customer’s situation?
Struggle to allocate enough time to consistently connect with their prospects, existing and past customers?
Have the wrong mix of sales resources?

Impact:
Having a reactive sales culture can result in:

Under-serviced existing customers
An increase in the number of inactive customers (customers who used to buy but now don’t)
Being vulnerable to the competition
Leads not being followed up
An inconsistent and insignificant new business pipeline
A lack of accountability (as “I am busy” becomes the built-in excuse)
A heavy dependence on a few key customers

The Solution: Re-design your Sales Organization

While the solution will differ from client to client (given their current situation and sales environment), Focus believes that the key to transitioning your sales organization from “reactive” to “proactive” starts with the concept of “divide and conquer”.

Let’s first start by stating that, generally speaking, there are 4 aspects of sales:

New Customer Generation - Opening new doors with new customers.
New Customer Sales - The consulting, quoting and closing of new customers.
Existing Customer Sales - Generating, consulting, quoting and closing of new business with existing customers.
Post-Sales Service - The servicing of your customer after their purchase (e.g. customer service, questions, transactional order entry, account receivable, logistics or invoicing issues).

The notion of “divide and conquer” is founded on the belief that having each sales person responsible for all 4 components of sales will leave them in a reactive, unproductive, tail-chasing and unfocused state for 3 reasons:

There legitimately may not be enough time in a day to cover all aspects well.
It is difficult to find resources with strong skills in all aspects.
Reactive aspects of the job (e.g. post-sales service and existing customer sales) will always trump the proactive, often more difficult and lengthier aspects (e.g. door opening).

Let Focus America help you dissect your current sales structure to identify how to redeploy the sales resources to better and more consistently manage all 4 sales aspects and all types of customers (big or small; new, past or existing). The result may be a change, an addition or even a deletion of certain existing roles. It will certainly result in a tighter, more measurable and accountable team focused on fewer, clear roles and responsibilities and fewer “I was too busy” excuses.

Once the new sales structure has been designed, Focus will then work with you to develop the “how” in terms of: