Sales

The Roland Berger sales excellence approach helps our clients answer the key questions that arise when they optimize their sales organization.

What is the best sales organization for us?

Companies increasingly align their sales organizations to both customers and channels. This is not without risks. We assist our clients in finding the appropriate segmentation of their customer base and the best structure for their sales organization.

What is the right sales channel portfolio?

Channel portfolios are becoming more and more complex, with channel conflicts threatening existing business. Innovative channel management (ICM), the integrated, value-based Roland Berger approach, provides the know-how to manage complexity.

How can we optimize the performance of our sales operations?

Almost always there is hidden potential in our clients' sales systems. In order to exploit this potential, we have developed our fast, flexible and feasible sales performance approach.

What is the best way to manage and control our sales activities?

Many companies operate with unsophisticated controlling systems. They cannot precisely allocate indirect costs to customers or products and use insufficient reporting systems, planning instruments, and processes. We apply four powerful levers to strengthen our customers' sales monitoring systems.

What are your company's success factors? Define your organizational structure accordingly

In today's global and complex sales environment, the focus is on the customer. Companies increasingly align their sales organizations to both customers and channels. However, this effort can reduce sales efficiency and expertise for individual products. Bundling and commoditization can also put pressure on margins.

The key questions our clients need to answer when designing a sales organization are therefore:

• What is the ideal segmentation of my customer base?
• Which are the success factors for organizing sales at my company?
• Which organizational structure (by customer, region, product, function, and channel) supports these success factors?

In redesigning a sales organization, the first step is to segment customers and identify relevant success factors. The relationship between customer segments and the most important products is the defining factor. It tells companies whether they should focus on products, on the customer or on divisional organizations for specific industries.

This basic alignment of the sales organization provides the foundation for designing sales units in line with key account management. They can have either lead key account structures or selling teams with product and sales experts. The next step is then describing and sizing the functions, and setting up a transfer matrix.

There are many such decisions. We help our clients make them based on reliable facts and proven strategies.

Mastering complexity and innovation

Both B2B and B2C companies find it increasingly difficult to choose sales channels and manage their variety: Customer needs are becoming ever more diverse and hybrid. The era of mainstream channel mixes and one-size-fits-all approaches is over. Sticking to poorly performing traditional channels is a dead end. Companies that use innovative routes to the market are successful in responding to customer needs and outperform the competition.

As a consequence, selecting, managing and steering the channel portfolio is becoming increasingly complex. Interactions and conflicts multiply as the number of sales channels grows.

Innovative channel management (ICM)

Innovative channel management, the integrated, value-based Roland Berger approach, provides the tools to manage this complexity. Its results are amazing, with cost reductions of up to 20 percent and a 5 percent rise in sales. And our cross-industrial experience ensures seamless implementation with a focus on quick wins.

Fast, flexible and feasible – Improving your sales efficiency by exploiting hidden potential

The new approach to sales performance many senior managers are taking these days indicates a change in the way the economic situation is perceived. Sales performance is still seen as a key success factor, but the focus is shifting from cutting costs to improving sales effectiveness.

In order to exploit the hidden potential in our clients' sales systems, the Marketing & Sales Competence Center has developed a fast, flexible and feasible sales performance approach. And it pays off. Our projects typically improve sales efficiency by 10 to 20 percent. Savings can be used to increase sales effectiveness and boost sales figures and margins.

Improving efficiency to such an extent requires that we address all the important levers in sales operations – from increasing organizational and process efficiency to optimizing the customer and offering mix or adapting service levels. We identify benchmark-based efficiency targets, define suitable levers and develop individual concepts. We cover sales planning and steering, account and channel management, pricing, sales organization and sales processes.

Four levers to strengthen your sales monitoring system

Many companies make do with rather unsophisticated sales monitoring systems. They cannot precisely allocate indirect costs to customers or products. Reporting systems often focus on financials only and do not properly illustrate results. Planning instruments and processes fail to indicate inconsistencies in forecasts and budget deviations at an early stage.

The weaknesses are manifold and are often similar across industries. To help companies eliminate them, Roland Berger has developed a sales management tool that has four components:

• Sales forecasting - increases the quality of our clients' sales forecasts by developing a standardized planning process. It also includes a forecasting tool and a monitoring instrument that tells our clients when they could miss their targets.
• Sales cost accounting - helps companies be more consistent in their profit focus. It uses direct costing based on customer and/or product profitability.
• Sales reporting - helps redesign the reporting system. The module provides our clients with a customized data analysis tool and a newly designed sales report.
• Incentive systems for sales - introduces (more) variable salary for sales staff and provides a model for evaluating individual performance and calculating bonuses.