How to combine your sales force in a merger.

McKinsey has published a paper on how to survive a merger and combine sales forces. By involving employees and customers in the integration process, it is possible to retain critical staff, generate momentum with key accounts, and increase customer satisfaction. If you are in the process of approaching an integration, can you risk loosing these key elements by doing a botched job?

We have identified four steps essential to facilitating the successful integration of sales operations. At the top of the list: understanding the importance of sharing information about the integration process with customers and the sales force. Many companies take the opposite approach and are surprised when postmerger revenue fails to meet expectations. In addition, the combined sales team must quickly win prominent accounts to build momentum and generate internal confidence in the merger. The executives running the integration effort must also recognize that, as important as sales reps are, essential support people must be identified and retained. Finally, senior managers should review the merged portfolio of customers and make tough calls about those that are worth new investments and those that might be shed or given less attention.

An integrated sales and marketing health check as you plan for next year

Monitor Consulting recently published on StrategicOxygen.com on the importance of awareness of where your organization currently exists. That progression is dependent on awareness.

Similar to Monitor Consulting, we too provide organizational assessments and have have seen vast misalingment, but also a lack of metrics to even build an understanding of current performance.

This is a picture from the blog entry on managing performance, how can it be applied to your current campaigns?

The article asks the following questions:

• What are the likely pain points for next year?
• Where are the pain points you still need to solve?
• What experiments must we force to happen?
• What skills do we need to enhance?

Customer Acquisition and Retention: Price with Confidence

A new paper has been published by Accenture on customer acquisition and retention about pricing with confidence. This is a key article for any company emerging back into the market with growth targets.

In markets where customer behavior is hard to predict, sales teams typically agree to less advantageous pricing and undermine plans for new business growth and revenue.

This article advocates rooting out the common cause for this behavior and foster a culture with leadership that enforces performance behaivor to help sales teams price with confidence and increase top line growth.

Eight Questions to Assess Your Sales Organization

Melissa Raffoni at the Harvard Business Review is in the process of surveying 50 CEOs ranging from 10-1000 employees. Now at the mid-research point, what she’s found keeping CEOs up at ngiht is how to optimize the sales channel.

The 8 key questions she suggests you ask in assessing your sales organization’s effectivness are:

1. “Ok, tell us again, what’s your value proposition? Why should customers choose you over the competitors?”  It’s so basic, isn’t it?  Yet, I continue to be amazed at how difficult it is to answer this question well. With the constantly changing competitive landscapes and customer needs, every company should take a second look at what they are pitching and why it still resonates today.  I’m sure, for most, the value proposition needs a facelift.
2. “What is your sales process and how does your organizational structure map to it?”
3. “Do you think your overall cost of sales is where it should be?  What makes you think that?  Are you comparing to an industry standard or mapping to a projected financial model?”
4. “What key measures are you using to track sales effectiveness? Do you have a sales dashboard?” Is it cost of sales as a percentage of revenue, close ratio, sales person productivity? Something else? You can’t really optimize if you don’t know which lever you want to move.
5. “If you believe there are two ways to drive sales–increase the funnel and/or increase the close ratio–what are you doing to achieve those increases?
6. “Is sales compensation driving the right behaviors?” Is there enough of a variable compensation component to make a difference?
7. “It’s a new world, how are you taking advantage of it?” Partners are willing to talk, new talent is on the street, customers are looking for high ROI offerings, social media is changing how people communicate. Are you experimenting?
8. Do you have the right people?