Implement Best Practices throughout the Entire Organization
Coordinating efforts between management, marketing and sales … maintaining the proper focus … investing in effective selling tools.
Turning the talent and skill of your brightest people into Best Practices for the rest of your organization is one of the most efficient ways to raise the quality of customer sales and support across your organization. Here are a few tips for getting started in defining your own Best Practices.
Establish a balanced team to define Best Practices. There is often a disconnection between management, sales communications, and field sales. The first step in defining Best Practices is to get input from all relevant parties and identify practices already in place or standard practices for the industry. It’s important to level the playing field of your organization by sharing the best thinking with those who interface directly with key customers on a regular basis.
Focus on business-building initiatives that contribute to top line sales. Leverage your investment in top customer teams to drive practices for 2nd and 3rd tier retailers. The consolidation of retailers means that fewer retailers make up the majority of sales for many manufacturers. These large retailers require teams versed in category structure, POS information, syndicated data, analysis techniques, and software tools. Share this expertise with less experienced customer teams.
Acquire tools that integrate Best Practices into the workflow. In addition to increasing sales effectiveness, Best Practices should contribute to increased sales efficiency. Streamlined business practices should be accompanied by technology that supports and enables the new processes. For example, developing a standard retail business review may require tools to create a series of charts or templates from which custom presentations can be built.
The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.
