Who are your customers and why……..sounds obvious enough – but how well understood is the value chain in which you operate and the Sales Team strategy you employ ?

I stopped counting and running ratios a few years back now, but at last count around 80% of the B2B sales organisations I asked failed the value chain question.  I find myself in workshops with heads of Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Operations seeking clarity from the group in terms of identifying their customers by value chain segment and justifying their nominations.  Around 80% of the time the group response was somewhat aligned featuring only succinct nuances on identities and/or terminology, through to lengthy verbal disagreements and intransigence.

It becomes important as part of the annual Sales and Marketing strategy review to go back to basics and define and articulate the value chain in which the organisation operates.  Too often this step is ignored.  The consequences manifest as muddled marketplace targeting, “silo-ism” between State, Regional or Divisional Sales units, suboptimisation of the synergy between Sales, Marketing and Customer Service resources.

“The value chain question” is actually a series of eight questions.  Try running this by your key leaders of Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance, Operations.

• What players make up our value chain environment?
• Who ultimately “consumes” our product/service in its form as we know it?
• Who starts our value chain ?
• Where are we in this picture?
• Who is/are our customer(s)?
• Who are not?
• Why?
• How many parallel distribution channels exist within our value chain?

Wait a minute………….what is the difference between a distribution channel and a value chain?  The clarity of answers to these questions are business critical.  Yet too many businesses feature lack of uniformity across the key business leaders’ answers.   Click here for a tool to assist.

Once you have nutted all that out (your value chain structure and strategy), then you should review the sales (team) strategy you employ within your value chain environment.  How do the value chain structure choices you made impact on which segments you harness your Sales Team to engage with?  How do you determine which segments to direct the Sales Team to employ a push sales strategy.  A pull strategy?  Both?  When do you gear them to ply the “gentle” art of sales specification?  Who do you transact with commercially and directly  and who you commercially transact with indirectly? Click here for a tool to assist.

April is all about the check up – Regular healthchecks…..on the key customer interfaces with Sales and Service.

Visiting The Next Level’s website can help put this discussion in perspective – There are many resources on our website which are being regularly expanded. Return to our Home page and browse the Workshops and Bootcamps your company could benefit from, as well as learning who our clients are, and what they have had to say about The Next Level.