Sales Effectiveness

Linking Selling Efforts With
Strategic Priorities

To help clients maximize the effectiveness of their marketing strategy—as well as realize their market potential—GMT provides consulting services aimed at aligning the daily work of the sales force with the top-level strategy for the business.

GMT helps its clients to ensure that their sales organization is a powerful strategic weapon—focused on understanding customer needs, offering insight into the competitive landscape, and enacting the business strategy on a daily basis.

By helping clients to build a consistent, strategy-based sales infrastructure, GMT ensures that individual sales representatives are concentrating on the most important channels, accounts, and products—and that their daily activities match the long-term vision for the business.

The Sales Force: A Strategic Tool
Removing Barriers to Effectiveness
Effective Selling: Building the Framework
The Power of Fact-Based Selling

The Sales Force: A Strategic Tool

While businesses seeking a competitive advantage routinely make aggressive investments in product development technologies, manufacturing systems, and other capital improvements, too often they overlook one of their most important assets: the sales organization.

Because the sales force forms the company's primary interface with its customers, the sales team has the power to become a key strategic asset. After all, it is the sales force that actually achieves top-line revenue growth, day by day and account by account.

GMT begins by helping clients to answer questions such as:

	Do salespeople reflect strategy in their daily activities?
	Do we reward salespeople for achieving strategic performance targets?
	Have we provided selling tools that are directly related to our overall strategy?
	Do salespeople understand the potential of their markets—and fully capture it?

Removing Barriers to Effectiveness

GMT has the broad management expertise to help clients ensure that their top-level strategy is being enacted with individual customers. Based on years of client experience, GMT also understands the most common obstacles to sales effectiveness, such as:

	Acting as "firefighters" or customer service representatives
	Measuring success only by top-line sales increases, instead of profitability and strategic progress
	Failing to capitalize on market potential due to a lack of understanding or motivation
	De-emphasizing new marketing programs in their customer interactions, in favor of proven ones
	Selling products they are comfortable with, instead of strategically important offerings
	Focusing on existing accounts—not on new, faster-growing customer segments

Effective Selling: Building the Framework

Leveraging the strategic power of the sales force requires the development of an enterprise-wide framework that consistently reinforces strategic priorities. GMT has helped clients in a wide range of industries to create effective sales support systems that include:

	Communications systems that increase understanding of strategic priorities and related sales initiatives
	Training programs aimed at helping the sales force to enact the strategy with individual customers
	Compensation systems that reinforce behaviors that will lead to strategic growth
	Detailed sales planning leading to growth within critical regions and accounts
	Marketing tools that accurately communicate customer messages that support strategic goals

An effective infrastructure removes the barriers to strategic selling—and makes it easy for the sales force to focus on shared enterprise-wide goals.

The Power of Fact-Based Selling

Accurate, accessible information—about both broad market trends and individual account performance—is a key component of sales effectiveness.

GMT's consultants help to provide salespeople with access to:

	Highly segmented market data that identifies strategically important channels, customers, regions, and products
	Customer information, including purchasing history, order status, and service levels
	Product information, such as applications, competitive offerings, and availability
	Insight into industry and end-user trends that can translate into specific sales initiatives

By increasing the organization's basic understanding of customer and end-user needs, as well as industry trends—and sharing this insight with the sales team through enterprise-wide information systems—GMT helps clients to manage their business and sell products based on facts, instead of intuition.