WHY RESILIENCE – WHY NOW? If your company is challenged by the current volatile market dynamics, you should regard these times as a window of opportunity to rethink your sales and service channels to better reflect customer behaviour in a post-crisis market. By adapting your sales and service model to the new business environment, you will realise efficiency improvements and enable your company to become more resilient to future market fluctuations. Resilient business models are characterised by the ability to recover from, or withstand, tough market conditions while also reacting to changes. This means that a resilient sales and service model needs to be flexible and efficient by quickly (re)deploying resources for maximum value creation. HOW TO OPTIMISE YOUR SALES AND CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR THE PRESENT AND BEYOND In past years, B2B field sales has grown into a dual role with very different requirements. Driven by budgetary pressures, sales representatives increasingly need to have the ability to navigate and drive large complex deals with long sales cycles, while at the same time work as the order taker and relationship manager for many smaller customer transactions, often used to close the budget gaps. Similarly, the more cost-effective customer service function has in many instances been reduced to a backoffice function that takes care of the order-to-cash process and coordinates information between the supply chain and sales functions. For most companies, this is not an optimal way of leveraging their sales and service capabilities. By redeploying resources and rethinking the structure of the sales front line, companies can both lower the cost to sell and capture growth potential. 1. Relationship management 2. Negotiation 3. Closing CUSTOMER SIZE CUSTOMER SIZE Customer service Inside sales Sales reps 1. Specifications 2. Technical dialougue 3. Planning 1. Order-to-cash 2. Logistics Figure 1: The move towards a more resilient sales and service model 3
Download PDF file