Sales Effectiveness

Partners: Michael Norkus & Brad Dufour

Most leaders recognize that customers are the lifeblood of a successful company. Failure to listen and adapt to customer needs and wants is a recipe for disaster. However, in the quest to generate sales growth, companies often neglect the importance of selling resources as a mechanism for understanding changes in customer needs and incorporating those changes into the design of their products. Every interaction with your customers is an opportunity to collect information regarding customer needs and to translate that data into the creation of a superior product or service offering.

We believe that a winning sales strategy is one that is well integrated with all the major business processes of the company. The effectiveness of your sales process is dependent on far more than the people, training, and compensation plans you use to drive revenue. Effective selling is achieved by an integrated focus on:

  • Developing a keen understanding of your customers’ business and strategic and operational challenges
  • Translating that knowledge into a product or service that meets customer needs
  • Efficiently deploying your sales resources across multiple channels to reach your targeted customer segments

Our Capabilities

To maximize the return on your investment in this critical customer-facing discipline, we believe it is important to focus on four key elements of efficient selling:

  • Understand your customers' needs and tailor your products and services to meet those needs
  • Align your capabilities and value proposition to build an offering that can be consistently delivered to your customers, creating a "delightful" experience
  • Integrate multiple selling channels as appropriate to reach targeted customer segments, leveraging your investment in sales and marketing resources
  • Create a feedback loop to measure the success of your efforts and refine your products and services on an ongoing basis

Alliance has assisted a number of companies in using customer and market data to develop integrated, multi-channel sales strategies that embrace the elements above. Our experience spans many industries, including consumer and industrial products, business-to-business products and services, financial services, and information technology.

Case Study

  • A fast-growing manufacturing services company builds a multi-channel sales strategy
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