Introduction to Sales Force Effectiveness

• Customer strategy: focusing on the right customers with the right offerings through the correct channels and meeting customers' needs

· Sales deployment: adopting appropriate balance between front- and back-end resources, territory alignment & sizing, roles, skills, training & coaching, and incentives alignment

· Sales planning: having effective sales pipeline, lead generation, marketing, account planning, and target setting processes – aligned with the customer strategy

· Support, tools & processes: having effective processes, tools, policies, and IT systems

· Performance management: measuring and tracking the right metrics and using them effectively in the decision process as well as rewarding behavior that drive results

During a diagnostics at one company across the five areas, sales managers were interviewed and through a web-based survey, all sales people were able to provide input to the assessment. Top managers across the organization then met to review the results and discuss what could be done to address the identified improvement opportunities.

Opportunities included improving channel management in the UK, targeting a new market segment in Norway, addressing pricing misalignment and price policies, and re-define sales support roles to allow sales representatives to spend more time with customers in the company's home country.

Another company needed to re-align sales territories to optimize sales and improve clarity regarding sales and support roles. Diagnostics across the five areas help companies identify where to focus. Some organizations have experienced double digit EBITDA growth by addressing sales effectiveness, usually through a combination of sales growth and margin improvement.

One can also expect a number of non-financial benefits including clearer sales focus, effective lead generation and planning, aligned organization, effectively meeting customer needs, efficient sales support, and focused performance tracking—just to mention a few examples. Addressing sales force effectiveness should cover a comprehensive set of areas as described above.

Rickard Alfredéen is the founder of Oneforce, a management consulting firm focusing on commercial excellence. He has consulted to more than forty companies and has extensive experience with firms such as Bain & Company and Booz & Company in the U.S. and Europe. He holds an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston and M.Sc. in Engineering Physics from Uppsala Universitet. The author can be reached at alfredeen@oneforcegroup.com.