A Manufacturer Catalyzes Growth with Sales Plays

Companies often struggle to generate a high-quality pipeline, and IndustrialCo* was no exception. We worked closely with the company’s commercial team to embed our Sales Play System as a more prescriptive and systematic way to drive sustainable long-term growth.

Sales plays are targeted, repeatable sales and marketing motions designed to achieve specific commercial missions. IndustrialCo focused on three critical areas: winning new customers, winning back previous customers, and increasing cross-sell revenue.

Over the course of 10 weeks, we held a series of workshops with regional sales and marketing teams to identify more than 100 potential sales plays. From there, we winnowed the list to about 20 that IndustrialCo could launch over the ensuing 12 months across two regions.

To create the sales plays, consultants and marketing experts from our FRWD^® team collaborated with working groups of sales reps, sales managers, strategic marketers, digital marketers, and product managers from IndustrialCo to develop persona-specific sales and marketing collateral—including outbound sales cadences, call guides, emails, buyer personas, message maps, LinkedIn ads, competitive battlecards, and objection handling guides.

This effort was greatly enhanced by the use of a proprietary gen AI tool that enables companies to develop high-quality, personalized collateral at scale. Each sales play was supported by a coordinated digital campaign running in parallel, with targeted language engaging the same accounts that sales reps were focusing on. Our team worked closely with IndustrialCo’s digital marketing team to develop the visuals and set up and monitor the account-based marketing campaigns. The first play launched within a month and was followed by a new play every two weeks, alternating across North America and the EMEA region.

Built for long-term success

By adopting Sales Play System, IndustrialCo was able to radically transform its ways of working in three key areas. First, it stood up a Win Room to function as a “control tower,” enabling the company to (a) define and prioritize the sales play backlog, and (b) monitor priority plays in field and provide actionable feedback. Second, for each play a cross-functional team of product, marketing, and sales experts worked as a “sales play factory” to develop the key content required, along with the proactive and prescriptive set of field test actions that consistently lead to closed-won opportunities. Finally, through a series of targeted interviews and surveys, we found that sales management routines, including the frequency, duration, and focus of one-on-one meetings between sales managers and sales reps, varied greatly and were often ineffective. To address this, we brought in training experts from Bain Academy^SM to assess current practices, define the future-state cadence, and upskill sales managers through targeted training, including a hands-on enablement program and immersive, interactive workshops.

The response was overwhelmingly positive: 100% of sales managers adopted the new routines around frequency and focus of pipeline reviews and coaching conversations. Three months later, they reported strong impact on sales rep productivity and engagement; 9 of 10 participants said they would recommend the training to their peers. In addition, sales performance is now tracked through standard SPS dashboards integrated within the company’s Salesforce and Power BI tech stack, instilling a new level of pipeline management discipline.

Results and impact

Adopting our Sales Play System enabled IndustrialCo to quickly realize significant benefits. In addition to a 2x–3x increase in advertising click-through rates just one month into the launch of the first three sales plays, the company generated $2.5 million in prospective revenue (equivalent to about30% of the typical pipeline generated in a similar period). The pilot program paved the way for a fully scaled deployment with a calculated run-rate impact of $12–$14 million in the next 12 months, translating to approximately 3%–3.5% of incremental growth in the upcoming year.

As impressive as those near-term results are, the most important impact has been the transformation of IndustrialCo’s commercial operations. Its embrace of Sales Play System has brought with it new capabilities, enhanced ways of working, and an entirely new level of pipeline management discipline. As it expands both the number and reach of the sales plays it deploys, the company is poised to build on its recent success for years to come. 

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Bain Academy^SM is a service mark of Bain & Company, Inc.