Sales & Channel Effectiveness

Bain’s unique approach, called TOPSales, is based on our experience of the best demonstrated practices of sales organizations in many industries and regions:

• Targeted offerings: Identify and focus on the highest priority customer segments with products and solutions that are bundled and priced for maximum revenue, retention and renewals.
• Optimized tools and procedures: Develop the right cadence for monitoring the results of customer-facing selling efforts in a timely way, and then reinforce it with effective forecasting, lead generation, back-office technology, support and service.
• Performance management: Recruit, train and retain high-potential sales teams; track key measures of their performance and motivate them with pay and incentives that reward success on companywide, as well as individual, metrics.
• Sales resource deployment: Develop the right coverage model for each customer segment; assign responsibilities and design territories to make the best use of scarce resources.

Bain helps to drive improvements in productivity and growth beginning with an assessment of a company’s selling system. We then work with a company to develop a pragmatic, actionable implementation schedule that can reliably increase sales without disrupting a company’s current revenue streams.

• Customer sweet spot: Zero in on your highest-value customers.
  If the salesforce and channels don’t know which customers are most profitable today or in the future, then any segmentation strategy is futile.
  
• Coverage and capacity: Match the right customers and channels.
  Technological innovations, maturing markets and more sophisticated buyers have opened a host of routes to the customer. Effective sales organizations choose deliberately, based on economics, selecting the channel that is most cost effective, yields full revenue potential and ultimately exceeds the expectations of their target customers.
  
• Compensation and incentives design: Align individual success with growth.
  Most sales executives understand that compensation practices affect their companies’ ability to recruit and retain top talent. Yet surprisingly few design compensation plans to achieve growth targets.
  
• Revenue acceleration: Stop leaving money on the table.
  Some of the biggest profit uplift potential comes from selling more—and smarter—to the current customer base. Two fast ways to boost both the top and bottom lines are to tighten up pricing discipline and to engage in focused cross-selling to the most promising segments.
  
• Metrics and tracking: Measure what matters.
  Best-performing companies base their rewards on outcomes. Those output metrics are clear and support specific business goals. They are also externally focused and regularly benchmarked.
  
• Tools and support: Reps’ time should be spent selling.
  Mobilizing back-office resources to augment field reps’ efforts is a powerful force multiplier. The best sales organizations therefore measure customer facing time and use internal support to create more.