The following is an excerpt from Building a Winning Sales Force: Powerful Strategies for Driving High Performance by Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha and Sally E. Lorimer. Zoltners, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, and Sinha founded ZS Associates in 1983. Lorimer is a business writer and an independent sales and marketing consultant.
The GE Story: Improving Sales Force Effectiveness Across Businesses
Many companies with large sales forces have initiated cross-divisional and worldwide programs to enhance their effectiveness. While these initiatives have not been uniformly successful, many of the successes have had a dramatic bottom-line impact.
GE is an excellent example of a company that has had considerable success in implementing a cross-organizational initiative aimed at enhancing the global effectiveness of its sales forces. Drawing on two of GE's traditional strengths—a process orientation and an ability to develop and implement management ideas—the company has made substantial investments in enhancing global sales force effectiveness, beginning in 2006. Just two years later, benefits from this investment had already been realized in all six of GE's major businesses and on six continents.
A Commitment to Growth Brings a Need for Commercial Excellence
In September 2001, Jeffrey Immelt succeeded Jack Welch as chairman and CEO of GE. In a world stunned by the events of September 11, 2001, Immelt's challenge was to take the fine-tuned productivity machine that GE had become and continue moving it forward. He set ambitious goals for sustaining organic growth, with the aim of growing existing GE businesses organically two to three times faster than the increase in world GDP. Achieving this would require GE to develop a more global, diverse, and customer-driven culture.
Immelt's plan had six components, one of which was a commitment to "commercial excellence." Achieving commercial excellence required putting talented sales and marketing leadership in place and developing a world-class sales and marketing organization. Building on GE's strength as a process-driven organization, the company set out to create consistent processes and methodologies for sales and marketing decision-making that would enable the company to draw new revenue streams from existing businesses.
A look around at the various GE businesses led to an interesting insight. Those that had been most successful at driving organic growth over the previous several years were those that had been effective at utilizing data, analyses, processes, and tools to help with sales force decision-making. Consequently, GE's commitment to commercial excellence would require bringing a more scientific approach to sales and marketing decision-making and applying that approach more consistently across businesses.
Bringing Science to Sales and Marketing
With the hiring of Dan Henson as chief marketing officer in January 2006, the final piece needed to get GE's commercial excellence initiative up and running was in place. Dan believed that technical depth and focus were needed to create the discipline and rigor required for success, and he chose three initial areas of focus. He appointed a global director at the corporate level to oversee each of the three areas: go-to-market segmentation, pricing, and sales force effectiveness (SFE). The three directors were charged with bringing commercial excellence to their respective areas.
They would do it by:
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