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Title: Selling Solutions Adapt your sales policy to a service strategy. Analysis based on ideas published by leading experts, in particular in the books presented below and in the publications cited in the "Find Out More" insets. Sales
Force Design for Strategic Advantage, La
Vente complexe [The Complex Sale], Rethinking the Sales Force,
Manageris 132b. Faced with the growing difficulty of differentiating their offerings, many companies have turned to so-called “service strategies.” Rather than just sell products, they have decided to develop customized packages and start selling solutions to their customers. However, they often encounter problems implementing this strategy. In particular, a radically different conception of business development is needed. From our selected publications, we have drawn many practical recommendations on ways to change sales force behavior to give this strategy every chance of succeeding. Main subject [Service
Strategy] |
Reading Tips for...
Sales Force Design for Strategic
Advantage,
Andris A. Zoltners, Prabhakant Sinha, Sally E. Lorimer,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Written as a collaborative effort by three partners of ZS Associates, a sales force organization consulting firm, this book is impressive in its content, given the variety of subjects covered, the number and relevance of the illustrative examples cited and the precision with which the tools that it presents are described.
- The objective is ambitious, as the book attempts to present all of the parameters that must be taken into account in the sales force organization, and provide readers with a method to design the organization best adapted to their needs. A general outline of this approach is summarized in chapter 2.
- A first chapter convincingly explains why changes in the economic environment are forcing many companies to completely transform their commercialization methods.
- The explanations in chapters 3 and 4, devoted to defining an offering and selecting a market penetration strategy, are nothing really new, but perfectly summarize the objectives of this initial design phase.
- The second part of the book (chapters 5 to 8) covers practical topics that are rarely presented in such a thorough and well-developed fashion, such as deciding how specialized salespeople should be, structuring the sales force, sizing teams, defining the territory to assign to each salesperson, etc. For each of these topics, many methods and concrete case studies are presented in great detail with explanations that are easy to understand.
- The last chapter, devoted to sales force change management, provides a few good suggestions on a general level.
Rethinking the Sales Force,
Neil Rackham, John DeVincentis, McGraw-Hill, 1999.
Although this fun and lively book dates back a few years, it is still highly relevant. It is articulated around the distinction between three types of sale – transactional sales, based on price and sales channel efficiency; consultative sales, oriented around customer advice; and B2B sales, aimed at establishing long-term partner relationships between the supplier and the customer. Each of these sales methods is analyzed to highlight its special characteristics, before making recommendations on key success factors. An additional strong point is chapter 9, devoted to sales force change management, which is a model of precision in analyzing objectives and of realism in recommending key action items.
La
Vente complexe [The Complex Sale],
Laurent Dugas, Bruno Jourdan, Dunod,
2003
Co-authored by the two founders of a consulting firm specialized in selling complex solutions, this book, written in French, is a how-to manual for this type of sale. Chapters 2 to 4 are particularly interesting. They contain many pieces of useful advice and original and concrete examples showing how to identify customer needs, design a solutions offering adapted to these needs, and position this offering relative to the competition. It is unfortunate that the changes required for the sales force to learn to sell complex solutions are covered in a fairly precursory manner in chapters 7 and 8.
Critical commentary
By René Y. Darmon, Honorary Professor at ESSEC and Affiliate Professor at HEC Montreal.
In Sales Force Design for Strategic Advantage, Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer address a subject that is often neglected, and rarely covered in such great detail – sales force organization and structure.
As the authors rightly emphasize, rethinking the sales force organization and structure is nonetheless something that companies should do regularly, about every two years on average. This necessity, combined with the potential savings opportunities associated with a well-calibrated sales force, make this a topic of capital practical importance for a great many companies. With this book, the authors thus fill an important gap in sales force management literature.
This book offers the advantage of being written in a simple, straightforward style, and avoids the trade jargon that is too often used in this type of text. The structure is clear and readers are drawn from cover to cover with a guiding thread described in the first two chapters. The various concepts and phases of the process are illustrated by many examples undoubtedly drawn from a vast store of experience in the consulting firm the two senior authors formed several years ago (ZS Associates). A relatively minor criticism concerning the format is the fact that the (excessive?) number of insets may interrupt the continuity of the text and distract some readers.
Concerning the content, the authors propose a solid conceptual framework to address the issue of sales force organization and structure. This framework is simple, logical and relatively easy to follow, while offering ample detail. This is the major contribution that makes this book a valuable and useful tool.
Nevertheless, this impression of facility can be misleading for managers new to the subject. Several steps of the process may require more analysis and skills than the book might imply. For example, the proposed procedures for determining the size of the sales force are not always immediately applicable.
Moreover, as with most sequential processes, sufficient account is not taken of the interactions that exist between the various steps of the proposed process. Even optimal decisions made at a given step can become constraints for the following steps. For example, how to choose a good sales strategy (step 1), without considering sales costs, and thus sales force size and structure (step 3)? Ideally, all decisions should be made simultaneously, which naturally would make the problem practically impossible to resolve.
Second, as the authors underline in the preface, this book covers sales force management on a general level. To address this type of question properly, more specific management questions cannot and should not be ignored. Finding the “optimal” structure for a sales force is one thing. Taking account of the potential reactions of individual salespeople concerning this new structure and organization is another. By treating problems at a level that is too general, the company risks ignoring the human issues that can be caused by objectively “optimal” solutions.
However, these criticisms are modest relative to the importance of this book in terms of the general sales force management practices. Aimed principally at seasoned practitioners, it is designed to be a work of reference for any company unit with a direct sales force.
Further readings…
To delve more deeply into the psychological approach to analyzing culture, we recommend the following sources:
- Customer
Intimacy,
Fred Wiersema,
Knowledge
Exchange,
1996.
(Book
and Manageris
synopsis
50a)
Acquire a competitive edge by offering a solution perfectly adapted to the specific needs of each customer.
