Four steps to seeing your Customer Forest...and differentiated sales strategy

Many Consumer Goods sales organizations are characterized by an exceptional ability to focus on tactical execution. Feet on the street who know their customer and how to operate to deliver on their number. Each retail customer is like a tree that the Account Executive knows how to water, fertilize, prune and ultimately harvest for maximum value.

While sales management needs to see the individual account nuances that sales people leverage every day, they also need to see the entire Forest of Customers. To guide sales strategy, management has to understand the organization’s competitive positioning, the interactions between customers, the potential sources of future growth and how to best allocate the human, financial and supporting resources available to accelerate that growth.

Even some of the most advanced and respected sales organizations in our industry struggle with the challenge of collecting and synthesizing this quantitative and qualitative data, let alone translating the insights into actionable sales strategy for their Customer Forest. Committing to four straightforward steps can help make sure your organization will develop a sales strategy built for long term success.

1. Consistent Financial/Sales Data Collection—Most organizations have good access to basic sales metrics like dollar, case and volume sales as well as some form of customer profit measurement. These data are critical to informing how many resources should be applied to each customer. Most companies provide the organization access to a repository of canned reports, while more sophisticated organizations create a data lake that can then be analyzed flexibly across levels of the hierarchy. The best organizations also provide access to advanced metrics appropriate to their business needs, whether that means cost-to-serve, trade spending productivity by vehicle/season/event/price point, customer marketing spending and response, call frequency, etc.

2. Strategic Customer Insight Collection—Beyond the easily quantifiable metrics, sales management must amass extensive insights into the varied consumer bases, retail strategies and competitive environments of the customer forest. Multiple stakeholders must contribute to this understanding.

a. Field Sales—The salespeople closest to the customer must own thorough Customer Discovery. Development of baseline expectations regarding customer insight is critical but embedding a culture of perpetual Discovery across the organization is what enables the sales organization to plan more crisply and react more accurately. The best sales organizations have invested in the development of a repository or system for sharing customer insights back with HQ and management personnel.

b. Sales Management—Many Sales VP’s spend 75-100 days a year with Customers, but rarely take time from the “selling” and “firefighting” sessions to just conduct a Listening Tour. Dedicating just a week early in the planning cycle to visiting a rotating slate of customers to listen to their perspective on a strategically designed agenda can inform initiative prioritization and identify new opportunities.

c. HQ Customer Management—Discovery and Listening Tour insights are essential to seeing the Customer Forest but tend toward the ad hoc and qualitative. Conducting an online Customer Voice survey across customers will provide a quantitative base to the insights and allow the measurement of changes over time. Surveys can also provide an objective rating of the organization relative to competition in the Customer’s eyes. The best sales teams conduct custom surveys annually to allow insight into category and manufacturer-specific topics and then slice the data creatively to unearth new insights.

3. Synthesis of Insight Streams—Collecting all this great Customer Knowledge over the year is pointless if no one takes the time to synthesize the insights into the “so-whats,” identify future trends, define current and emerging customer segments, reconsider sales strategy and posit unmet customer needs. These are all important building blocks that should guide which initiatives the team pursues and more broadly what the sales organization stands for. Leading organizations use a framework like the one at the left to organize their priorities based on the importance of a capability to the customer and the strength of the sales team relative to the competition.

4. Application and Amplification of Strategic Insight—This is where the rubber meets the road, and the insightful strategy is transformed into differentiating tactics that guide behavior both at HQ and in the field. Sales Management may use the knowledge to segment the customer base on not just “importance” but also “how to win” at the customer. This “how to win” element drives the allocation of resources so that trade dollars, marketing initiatives, retail support etc. are deployed where they will have the greatest impact. The funding of new initiatives, capability development or skills training can also be supported by these insights. The field team can employ the broader learnings to present a clearer customer strategy to the account, identifying opportunity areas and plans to address them.

Seeing the Customer Forest is not just a strategic exercise; it’s a path to long term competitive advantage. Consistently executing against these four steps will enable:

· More productive deployment of scarce sales resources

· Better Customer Business Plans reflecting account priorities

· Identification of sales “Big Bets” to address market voids

· Clearer customer strategy and more favorable account relationships

· Improved customer segmentation beyond just scale

· More nimble response to customer opportunities

· Reduced spending on unimportant initiatives and capabilities

· Enhanced measurement of sales team progress over time

Keep your field organization focused on the trees. But if you want to set a long-term course for the organization’s success, make sure you really see the entire Customer Forest.

For more information on how we can help you see your Customer Forest, call Bob Hilarides at 847 917 5121, email him at BobH@KnowledgeAmp.com or visit www.KnowledgeAmp.com.