MARKETING & SALES CONSULTING

TNG helps companies optimize their marketing and sales strategy to drive profitable growth. We do this by drawing together insights from your customers, markets, business environments, and internal organization. Then we model the economic implications of these insights and compare them with what’s working for other companies. From there, we work with management to embed change in the organization’s practices and processes. The result? A value-creating commercial strategy that is unique to your business — right down to individual products, programs, and customer segments.

Our marketing and sales capabilities span the entire commercial journey.

Position, develop and invest in your brands to differentiate and drive growth. You’ll gain a clearer perspective of which customers a brand (or portfolio of brands) is serving. You’ll also understand each brand’s points of difference better, acquiring the insight to grow share, improve positioning and build clearer targeting of customer segments. All this points to higher revenues and profits from improved alignment with customers and distribution channels.

Increase customer traction by providing the seamless experience they want. This involves grasping customer needs across your portfolio of brands, products, and channels — and, through this, defining the important characteristics of customer experience. In return, see higher profitability and increased loyalty by focusing on strategies to address pain points and create customer advocacy. You’ll also improve your ability to serve targeted customer segments and develop differentiated customer experiences with high returns on investment. 

Bring a customer focus to developing new products and services. Assume a customer-centric lens as we develop new offerings. A key part of this is developing an understanding of customer needs — both met and unmet — from your own product offerings plus those of your competitors in order to identify new opportunities.

You’ll increase revenues and reduce the risk of failed product launches. You’ll also surface untapped product and service opportunities, and improve efficiency and speed to market, all via our customer-centric approach to innovation.

Maximize overall profit while increasing margins and/or market share. Getting pricing right is one of the most critical commercial decisions for any business. It can lead to significant increases in top-line results; the bottom-line effect is even greater. Our approach allows you to develop the optimal initial pricing framework and sales incentives and to see ongoing benefits from an analytical pricing framework informed by customers, market conditions, and the competitive environment.

Make the most of your channels to market by being in the right places in an optimal way. An adroit strategy is essential to winning in a rapidly evolving, digitizing channel landscape. We can help you develop this optimal strategy through an understanding of the customer’s journey and their likes and dislikes, combined with channel requirements, incentivization levers, and cost to serve. The outcomes will include greater reach, strategic differentiation between channels, and outsized share in growing channels — all translating to more revenue and profit.

Speak to the right customers in the right way at the right time. The marketing landscape is changing more rapidly than at any time in the recent past, with digital, social, and mobile technologies making traditional models of engagement obsolete. To develop marketing strategies that will direct your resources more effectively, we combine our commercial expertise in advanced data analytics with a game plan that gets your message in front of the audiences you need to reach. You’ll stimulate sales and strengthen your market positioning, thanks to a strategic view of the marketing mix that tie in more effectively with sales and product strategy. 

Define the optimal go-to-market strategy and commercial organization that will deliver against revenue growth or profit improvement objectives. In both nascent and mature markets, companies need to make complex choices around their go-to-market strategies, considering both direct and indirect models. In nascent markets, the relevant channel infrastructure may not be available, and a business may need to invest independently or in partnerships to build new routes to market. In mature markets, the distribution landscape may be evolving or consolidating. A business needs to carefully select the go-to-market and commercial models that would effectively and efficiently get its products or services to the customers while allowing the business to capture the maximum value across the distribution chain.

Reinvigorate revenue growth and optimize sales and marketing spending. Commercial Excellence comprises a series of steps that an organization can take to define its target customers and plan the delivery of its value proposition to them, supported by excellent sales and marketing execution. Commercial Excellence is key for businesses that seek to establish a new go-to-market model to enter new categories or markets, and also for established businesses that aim to gain a competitive advantage and target incremental growth in mature, highly competitive categories. In our experience, Commercial Excellence initiatives can yield concrete financial benefits in terms of revenue growth and/or substantial SG&A savings through optimized resource allocation. 

Identify the highest-priority customer segments to target and define value propositions tailored to the needs of those segments. Many companies struggle with how best to understand, segment, and prioritize customers — and how to optimize the economics, from both a provider and a customer perspective — leading to a “one size fits all” approach for allocating resources and investment. We rely on external research and rigorous quantitative analysis of sales data to inform customer groupings and determine the appropriate segments to pursue with the right value proposition. Our customer targeting capability provides clients with a clear focus on the “best fit” segments where the business can drive revenue and profit growth.

Improve and accelerate sales performance by determining the right processes and enablers to maximize the commercial team’s effectiveness. To realize sales gains, sales and marketing processes need to align with the customer strategy and go-to-market model throughout the sales cycle. Sales enablers, such as compensation schemes for the team, key performance indicators, systems and tools, and training programs, must also be established to ensure that the sales team has the best support. We advise and support management teams on establishing the right infrastructure to root out sales productivity drains, align incentives and ultimately drive sales growth.

A brand isn’t static. Its performance changes over time as consumer preferences shift, new channels appear, and competition piles into the market. Beyond that, overall performance figures can obscure underlying conditions. For instance, a brand’s rise might be unsustainably fad-driven; a decline might be due to a failure to recognize pockets of opportunity.

So brands require ongoing care. To keep them vibrant, brand owners need an appropriate overall architecture. They also must make resource allocations, track brand performance against competitors, evaluate the strategy against results, and periodically re-evaluate the desired market position. At the same time, each business decision has to stay true to the brand’s values, consumers, and promises.

How we support

We help you position, develop and invest in your brands to differentiate and drive growth. And we do it by bringing an analytical perspective to brand strategy so clients can realize maximum value across all brands, products, and channels — both physical and online ­— while recognizing the brand’s emotional elements. 

As part of that, we can:

• Evaluate overall brand performance
• Validate the profile of each brand’s key consumer segments
• Understand the key factors driving consumer purchasing behaviors
• Understand pricing power and permission to play across brands
• Identify growth potential through new channels
• Assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual brands

In addition, we support the development of new brands or the refreshment of an existing brand by doing the following:

• Establish how the key elements of each brand (product range, price points, positioning, channel availability, etc.) are differentiated in the minds of consumers and channel partners
• Identify ways to protect each brand’s differentiation to support individual brand and overall portfolio growth
• Determine the appropriate brand architecture, brand roles, and rules to exploit a brand portfolio’s full potential
• Define the appropriate and optimal role of each brand’s promotion and advertising messages across all channels including online   
• Simulate how changes to one brand affect other brands in a portfolio

Your benefits

• A clearer perspective on which customers each brand (or portfolio of brands) is serving, and how those brands should be positioned
• A better understanding of each brand’s points of difference
• Stronger market share from more defensible positioning
• A clear investment plan for the brand and associated financial benefits
• Higher revenues and profitability from improved alignment with customers and channels 

Today, firms are concerned with all aspects of engagement across the customer life cycle. The way companies think about customer experience is becoming increasingly omnichannel in nature. Enhancing the digital experience is gaining equal footing with — and becoming inseparable from — the optimization of human interactions in the physical world.

At the same time, companies want to build true loyalty among their customers, to keep them coming back and recommending them to others. Traditional loyalty programs play a role but must go beyond rewards and incentives. A loyalty strategy must deepen customer relationships through a greater understanding of and more relevant conversations with their target segments.

There is an explicit connection between customer experience and loyalty; without a great experience, there is no path to true loyalty, and without a loyalty strategy touching the digital and physical experience, programs risk being undifferentiated. Both loyalty and customer experiences provide essential elements of building a relationship with your customers, amounting to more than a simple transactional focus. They reduce the likelihood of loss to a competitor by reshaping the way customers think about, choose, use and endorse the goods or services you provide.

How we support

Our goal is to help you Increase customer traction by providing the seamless experience they want. We combine data and customer insight to help you create a world-class customer experience at every stage of the customer journey, from acquisition and development to commitment and retention. 

As part of this, we work with you to address the following questions:

• Does your company have a truly differentiated brand positioning and target group? Focusing on the core customer group is essential — too often, brands try to appeal to such a diverse audience that they dilute the experience and do not appeal strongly to anybody.
• Does your current customer relationship model really reflect how customer behavior is changing? Companies should be ready to redefine their business model around the customers they serve, not the products or services they sell — all while developing a cohesive experience across touchpoints.
• Is your company culture in sync with customer excellence? All consumer businesses should strive to deliver an authentic, consistent, and compelling experience, and link the experience to the corporate ethos and brand identity.

In addition, TNG supports many of the world’s largest, most innovative loyalty programs in retail, hospitality, airlines, and consumer services. From this experience, we’ve developed ways to bring together the distinctly different drivers of “true loyalty” and directly motivated behaviors, and then apply them throughout the customer journey. 

Specifically, we can help you:

• Identify customer pain points and develop plans to eliminate them
• Turn up opportunities to delight the customer
• Develop compelling programs that reinforce loyalty while remaining true to the brand, competitively differentiated and cost-effective
• Retool existing programs to reflect changing needs
• Build in elements that reinforce loyalty across the customer life cycle through personalization, gamification, and outstanding customer experiences
• Measure success and provide for the continued evolution of the customer experience that your company provides

Your benefits

• Greater profitability and loyalty via customer advocacy
• Lower cost of sales from stronger recommendations among customers
• Differentiated customer experiences with a high return on investment (ROI)
• An improved ability to serve targeted customer segments 

Product failures are expensive. And they’re common. Even the largest, most famous companies fall short sometimes when bringing new products to market. Nobody needs these failures, but what choice is there? Few companies succeed in the long term if they don’t continually reinvent their offerings.

The good news is that many of the problems underlying failure are preventable. The economic attractiveness of new (and existing) products can reveal itself via a thorough examination of the market, channel, and customer behaviors. Add an understanding of competitive action, cost dynamics, and internal capabilities to the mix and you’re looking at untapped opportunities for new product concepts.

How we support

We bring a customer-centric lens to the development of new offerings. 

As part of this service, we can:

• Understand customer needs — both met and unmet — from your ownduct offerings plus those of your competitors to identify new opportunities
• Uncover new product opportunities within markets, consumer segments, and distribution channels
• Establish a process for seizing new product opportunities
• Explain the business case for developing a new product
• Develop and test new product concepts, including formats and pricing
• Project sales, profits, and market penetration under a variety of scenarios
• Build go-to-market product launch plans
• Identify ways to commercialize the data you collect
• Identify other ancillary revenue strategies 
• Retool product and service portfolios, including areas where existing products need to be repositioned or rationalized
• Assess the effectiveness of your product development process
• Look for opportunities to reduce development time and costs
• Create an innovation capability within your organization

Your benefits

• Reduced costs from fewer product failures
• Increased revenues from capturing new opportunities
• Greater internal credibility from a strong track record in new product development
• Faster time to market due to a more streamlined innovation and product development process

Pricing is a particularly challenging discipline. What, for example, is the trade-off between price and the other value attributes of a product or service? And how do you measure elasticity without noise from other factors that influence demand (such as competitor promotions or discounts)?

To complicate matters, pricing is generally not as well understood as other metrics such as sales and growth. There’s also a cultural tendency in many organizations to emphasize discounts as a selling technique. On top of that are market-driven differences. Among businesses that target consumers (B2C), for example, the most innovative leaders capture sales by changing prices dynamically according to time, place, channel and customer behavior. But these kinds of price movements can be less effective for businesses that target other businesses (B2B), where customers are fewer, sales cycles are longer and transactions are often quite large. In other words, although price optimization is just as important in both environments, the strategy for implementing it might be altogether different.

How we support

We help you develop strategies for different types of pricing — including pricing to retailers, pricing into channels, and industrial pricing — by establishing the links between pricing and the attributes valued by different strategic segments. 

As part of this, we can:

• Clarify the market and competitive dynamics that affect pricing decisions
• Determine the attributes of a product or service that deliver value
• Determine what goes into the cost of a product or service to ensure that price structures deliver required profit contribution levels
• Model the effect of a given price on profit and/or volume
• Identify improvements in the way prices are set and delivered to the marketplace
• Design a process to consistently enforce pricing policies
• Create processes and incentives to focus the sales force on contract and account profitability
• Match pricing with the value that the customer expects to receive
• Uncover causes of margin leakage by analyzing historical sales data at the transaction level
• Link pricing strategy with product portfolio management
• Develop integrated pricing strategies across channels
• Design analytical tools to sustain improved pricing capabilities for the long-term

Your benefits

• A clearly defined pricing architecture and, where applicable, approach to yield and/or revenue management
• Greater understanding of the value attributes that mitigate sticker shock and should be communicated to each consumer segment
• More repeat transactions and larger basket size, thanks to the sharper range and merchandising strategies
• Optimized margins or market share
• Improved predictability of profit and volume
• Greater insight into transaction, customer, segment, and channel profitability 

For every product, there’s a delivery pipeline — often more than one. Consumer product manufacturers might rely on warehouse shipments, direct store delivery, or direct-to-consumer models. Software companies can turn to inside sales, distributors, OEM partners, and “touchless” customer acquisition. For their part, financial institutions have self-service, assisted self-service, and full-service options across a myriad of physical and virtual locations.

All this complexity can leave executives wondering which channels to prioritize. Each channel has its pros and cons, depending on the target consumers and their cost to serve. There’s also the issue of how to manage channels so they reach the consumer effectively. As eCommerce and physical channels continue to multiply, their alignment has never been more important. Finally, other channels are entering parts of the shopping journey — from idea generation to product review and purchase — and require astute management as well.

How we support

A successful channel strategy is about making the most of your channels to market by being in the right places in an optimal way. We help you identify the right channels — including emerging digital ones — to maximize profitable reach.

For example, we work with you to:

• Identify customer segments and the channels they use in the customer journey
• Evaluate the economics of communicating and selling through each channel
• Assess other risks and opportunities of a particular channel
• Determine the most effective ways to reach and serve each channel
• Create a mix of products, services, pricing, and promotions that appeal to each channel
• Design programs to encourage the highest possible channel performance
• Coordinate channels to provide a seamless customer experience
• Map out processes for managing channels and resolving channel conflict
• Adapt channel strategy to changes in the marketplace

Your benefits

• Greater efficiency across all channels
• Higher revenues from more effective channels
• Tighter integration with other marketing and sales strategies
• Improved access to target customers under the right conditions and times

The marketing landscape has changed. Digital, social and mobile technologies have upended old models of engagement. Consumers are better-informed, more skeptical of brands and institutions, and more divided in their attention. And the growth of data and business analytics has heightened expectations for marketing to prove its effectiveness.

For marketing, the results of all this have been mixed. On the one hand, marketers must work more closely with other functions to accomplish their objectives, leading to the broader adoption of a marketing mindset. On the other hand, many marketing organizations are now overwhelmed with administrative and short-term work, limiting their influence on the strategic, bottom-line issues that corporate boardrooms care about.

How we support

Done correctly, the right marketing strategy enables you to speak to the right customers in the right way at the right time. We help executives bring the power of marketing to advance a company’s strategy. 

Among other things, we can: 

• Create differentiation strategies based on price, products, service and other factors
• Define and prioritize customer segments for target marketing activities
• Design digital, offline, and channel marketing programs to achieve well-defined results
• Model the financial results of marketing initiatives under a variety of scenarios
• Identify and evaluate marketing vendors
• Build rollout plans and ongoing governance frameworks for marketing initiatives
• Develop analytical solutions that show how marketing initiatives are performing

Your benefits

• Higher yields from marketing spend
• Improved customer loyalty and retention rates
• Greater resilience to changes in strategy 
• Greater credibility within the C-suite

Commercial Excellence is a series of steps that an organization can take to define its target customers and deliver its value proposition to them through effective sales and marketing. Commercial Excellence is essential both for businesses entering new categories or markets and for established businesses seeking to gain a competitive advantage and achieve incremental growth in mature, highly competitive categories. TNG works closely with management teams on Commercial Excellence initiatives aimed at reinvigorating revenue growth, optimizing sales and marketing spending, and improving resource allocation.

Why companies need to improve commercial excellence

Companies face headwinds from intensifying competition in mature markets, weakness in emerging markets, global oversupply in commodity industries, or other factors. With underwhelming market growth, pressure increases to find unique ways to build competitive advantage and drive market share gains. Customers nowadays demand far more customized solutions and services for their specific needs, putting more pressure on commercial teams.

In addition, technology advancements, such as the Internet of Things and connected devices, mobility, cloud computing, and big data, are threatening to disrupt established market relationships and existing business models. As these changes unfold, there is a significant opportunity for businesses to transform their commercial models. Indeed, market leaders are evolving their organizations to support customer outcomes rather than product/service needs. 

This transformation requires companies to redesign every organizational function— especially commercial functions that involve delivering on the value proposition. Sales and marketing teams need to redefine their relationships with customers and deliver solutions that generate the right customer outcomes. Other functions, such as product development, engineering, and customer service, which tend to be disconnected from sales and marketing, need to embrace more cross-functional collaboration to improve product and service innovation.

Helping clients achieve commercial excellence

Our Commercial Excellence framework takes a holistic approach to address these key challenges. The framework ensures that a company’s go-to-market model is specifically configured to target the highest-value customers and to consistently deliver the company’s differentiated value proposition. 

Our Commercial Excellence initiatives entail working closely with management teams in three distinct areas:

• Customer targeting and value proposition: Focuses the business on the right customer segments, aligns each offer with customer needs and delivers the right economics to both customers and the provider.
• Go-to-market and commercial organization: Ensures that the business is using the appropriate sales channels (e.g., direct, inside sales, third-party intermediaries) for each customer segment and that commercial organization is optimally designed.
• Sales and marketing effectiveness Puts the right processes and systems in place to maximize the effectiveness of sales and marketing.

Our professionals have extensive experience in commercial excellence. They combine their deep knowledge with market-leading research and analytical capabilities to help clients identify opportunities for improvement and define unique, practical solutions. Our work focuses on both generating quick wins and building our clients’ strategic capabilities for the long term.

Commercial Fitness Assessment

Sometimes the root causes of commercial challenges are not readily apparent. In those instances, a quick diagnostic of the current commercial approach can help pinpoint issues and focus future efforts. Our Commercial Fitness Assessment (CFA) helps us quickly and effectively understand the drivers of under (and over) performance across the sales team and highlight areas that need attention.

We work closely with our clients to build a commercial platform for strong future growth, optimize resource allocation and drive cost efficiency. We typically help our clients achieve a 5-10% revenue uplift with minimal investment, or, where appropriate, reduce selling costs by 15-30%.

TNG helps clients identify the highest-priority customer segments to target and define value propositions tailored to the needs of the prioritized customer segments while optimizing the economics from both a provider and customer perspective. Many companies struggle with how to best understand, segment, and prioritize customers, leading to a “one size fits all” approach for allocating resources and investment. We rely on rigorous quantitative analysis of sales data, as well as external research, to inform customer groupings and determine the appropriate segments to pursue with the right value proposition. Our customer targeting capability provides clients with a clear focus on the “best fit” segments where the business can drive revenue and profit growth.

For both new and established businesses, focusing on the right customers can dramatically improve the performance of the business by optimizing sales and marketing investment. For businesses entering new markets, the benefits are obvious: They can target the right customer segments where the business’s value proposition is most effective and where the new business can rapidly drive profitable growth. Established businesses, on the other hand, can use customer targeting to better understand the profitability of different segments in the customer portfolio, find new opportunities to differentiate their proposition, pursue new pockets of growth and decide on the right strategy to serve (or not) less profitable segments. Clear customer targeting is particularly important in B2B markets, because requirements and value to the business may vary significantly across customers.

Many companies struggle with how to best understand, segment, and prioritize customers, fully delegating those decisions to their sales teams without clear guidance or structure. A poor understanding of the unique needs of different customer segments often leads to a “one size fits all” approach to allocating resources and investment. An inability of the organization to tailor its message to unique customer segments can lead to missed business opportunities or segments of the customer portfolio delivering low profitability.

How we support

Reviewing a business’s choices around customer targeting and value proposition is the first key step in our Commercial 

Excellence interventions:

 We help our clients target the right customers with the right value propositions by:

• Conducting customer segmentation based on different criteria (demographic, need-based, behavioral, or attitudinal), utilizing primary research methods (surveys or interviews) and analytical and statistical tools to manipulate large data sets
• Analyzing the economics of different customer segments to accurately estimate customer cost-to-serve and identify levers to improve profitability
• Effectively prioritizing customer segments for targeting based on their objective attractiveness (size, profitability, growth potential) and a company’s subjective right to win in each segment (e.g., fit of the value proposition with customer requirements)
• Bringing experience in reviewing all elements of the customer proposition, including profit and service offers, pricing, and relationship management model

Your benefits

• New customer segmentation to create a new, common frame of reference across commercial functions to coordinate and optimize sales and marketing activities
• Clear focus on the “best fit” customer segments where the business can drive revenue and profit growth
• Deep insight into the economics of different customer segments, including the levers available to improve the financial contribution of customer relationships
• Understanding of how the business’s value proposition needs to be tailored and implemented to better serve the needs of each segment

TNG works with clients to define the optimal go-to-market strategy and commercial organization that will deliver against their revenue growth or profit improvement objectives. In both nascent and mature markets, companies need to make complex choices around their go-to-market strategies, considering both direct and indirect models. In nascent markets, the relevant channel infrastructure may not be available, and a business may need to invest independently or in partnerships to build new routes to market. In mature markets, the distribution landscape may be evolving or consolidating. A business needs to carefully select the go-to-market and commercial model that would effectively and efficiently get its products or services to customers while allowing the business to capture the maximum value across the distribution chain.

Despite investing in significant improvements in product and service offerings, many companies fall short in meeting their growth or cost-efficient targets with their current routes to market. Seeking more effective and efficient ways to sell and service customers can be an important lever for businesses to drive revenue growth or profit improvement. In several industries, the channel landscape is evolving, with channels consolidating and becoming more powerful. Businesses need to adjust or diversify their go-to-market strategy to protect their economies and ensure sustainable distribution in the future. New digital and logistic capabilities allow businesses to directly serve end customers (consumers or businesses), reducing or eliminating the need for intermediaries, thereby both improving the service they provide to their customers and improving their margin economics.

In addition, customer expectations for both product and service quality are increasing, putting more pressure on sales teams, and supporting functions. Meeting (or exceeding) end-customer service requirements can be a means for a business to differentiate its position and ensure its long-term success. This may require increased investment in new capabilities to either serve end customers directly or complement or support the channels in doing so.

Optimizing a business’s go-to-market model often requires evaluating a range of options, including various indirect and direct alternatives. The starting point is an in-depth understanding of customer product and service requirements, the capabilities of different channels to meet those requirements, and the resulting economics for both the customer and the provider. The definition of the right go-to-market model allows a business to proceed to optimize its own commercialization and investment by clearly identifying the types of resources that are required to deliver against customer requirements and redeploying the resources against strategic priorities.

How we support

Go-to-Market and Commercial Organization is the second component of our Commercial Excellence framework, specifically focused on defining the optimal route-to-market strategy to its market context and strategic objectives and aligning a business’s commercial organization and resource deployment accordingly.

TNG helps organizations make the right decisions around their go-to-market strategy and helps optimize their commercial organizations and resource deployment by:

• Mapping the channel landscape and the distribution chain economics in a sector
• Evaluating existing or new go-to-market options based on strategic, commercial, and financial criteria
• Modeling value chain economics for providers, intermediaries, and customers under alternative go-to-market scenarios
• Specifically evaluating opportunities for businesses to develop new, often technology-led models to serve their customers directly, reducing or eliminating reliance on intermediaries
• Aligning commercial roles (e.g., sales, account management, product specialists, marketing, technical support, customer service) to deliver against the value proposition to customers
• Reviewing the structure and governance of the commercial functions to ensure strategic alignment and improve cost-efficiency
• Assessing the allocation of commercial resources, including sales, marketing, and other supporting functions, against strategic priorities

Your benefits

• A bespoke go-to-market platform to drive future growth, fully aligned to a business strategy and the requirements of its customers
• Improved ability to capture an increased share of the value the business is creating for its customers
• Enhanced commercial capabilities across the business to consistently deliver against the customer value proposition
• More sustainable go-to-market strategy for the future, ensuring continued effective distribution to customers and reducing the risk of disintermediation by the channels
• Optimal resource allocation to drive increased return on sales and marketing investment
• Reduction (where appropriate) of the overall sales and marketing cost to release profit to the bottom line 

TNG helps clients across industries improve and accelerate sales performance by ensuring that the right processes and enablers are in place to maximize the commercial team’s effectiveness. Sales and marketing processes need to align with the customer strategy and go-to-market model throughout the sales cycle to realize sales gains. Sales enablers, such as the compensation scheme for the team, key performance indicators, systems and tools, and training programs, must also be established to ensure that the sales team has the best support. We advise and support management teams on establishing the right infrastructure to root out sales productivity drains, align incentives and, ultimately, drive sales growth.

Companies are increasingly being asked to be more agile, be more efficient, and do more with less. M&A activity and the expansion of solutions sales are increasing demands to cross-sell and upsell products and services. To compound matters, many companies that experienced downsizing in sales and key support areas during the recession have been slow to bring resources back. In addition, customers are demanding customized solutions, and greater support and responsiveness. Companies can no longer rely on just selling great products and services. They often need to offer value-added solutions to their customers that better align with the customers’ needs and help deliver a specific outcome.

The “one size fits all” sales process is no longer sufficient to capture new customers or to grow the share of wallet with existing customers and does not distinguish strategic opportunities from average ones. Companies need to re-examine their sales processes and support sales enablers to drive higher productivity and return on investment from their sales resources.

How we support

Sales and Marketing Effectiveness is the third component of our Commercial Excellence framework, specifically focused on defining improvements in commercial processes and their key enablers.

Evaluating key processes is the first stage of establishing strong sales and marketing support. Sales enablers must also be refined to ensure that the sales team has the best support possible. This can include the compensation scheme for the team, key performance indicators to monitor success, systems, and tools to facilitate the customer management process, HR support for recruiting hiring, and continuous training.

We focus on generating quick wins while helping our clients build their sales and marketing capabilities for the long term. In our experience, working closely with clients on these issues often yields incremental revenue growth of around 5-10% with low-to-no incremental capital investment.