Organizing sales to be fit for growth

Systematic account planning: 

More often than not, practical account plans with clear objectives, actions and sales strategies are lacking. Developing structured account plans enables sales teams to strategically manage and grow key accounts, fostering long-term relationships and revenue streams. The process begins with a structured account assessment, analyzing past performance, customer needs, strategic direction and competitive positioning. Next, sales teams should map key stakeholders, identifying decision-makers and influencers to tailor engagement strategies. Following this, goal setting and opportunity identification help prioritize growth areas and define clear objectives for the account. The next step is to develop a customized action plan, outlining specific initiatives, timelines, and responsibilities across sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Finally, regular review and adaptation ensure that strategies remain aligned with evolving customer needs and market conditions, driving sustainable growth and long-term profitability. 

Understanding internal requirements:

As sales teams refine opportunity qualification and systematic account planning, internal roles and processes must evolve to support these improvements. One key change is the establishment of deal teams—cross-functional groups that collaborate to assess high-value opportunities, align on strategic priorities, and ensure a tailored approach for each account. Additionally, specialized negotiation teams can be introduced to handle complex deals, equipping sales professionals with advanced pricing strategies and value-based selling techniques. Enhanced collaboration between sales, marketing, pricing and product management ensures that all customer touchpoints are aligned, reinforcing a consistent and compelling value proposition. By optimizing internal structures and investing in role specialization, organizations can improve win rates, drive higher deal values, and build long-term customer relationships. 

2. Digital sales transformation – digital sales enablement

As digitalization of the purchasing function accelerated over the past years, commercial investments are lagging behind in many organizations. Sales organizations must step up adopt advanced tools to optimize their sales cycle, improve efficiency, and enhance customer engagement. AI-driven technologies now play a crucial role across three key areas: optimizing the route to market, streamlining sales processes, and improving sales effectiveness. By integrating AI and automation into digital sales transformation, companies can shorten sales cycles, increase conversion rates, and unlock new revenue opportunities. typically, there are three key pillars of digital sales transformation and how AI enhances each: 

Optimizing route-to-market:

Optimizing the route to market starts with robust omnichannel platforms and intelligent product configuration tools. AI-powered omnichannel solutions can personalize the buying experience, recommend relevant products, and dynamically adjust pricing based on customer behavior. Digital configuration tools further streamline the process by allowing customers to customize complex products effortlessly while ensuring feasibility and pricing accuracy. Together, these solutions reduce friction in the purchasing process and increase self-service capabilities, ultimately driving higher conversion rates and revenue. 

Sales process optimization: 

Sales process optimization focuses on reducing time-to-market and improving operational efficiency. AI-driven quote generation systems can analyze historical data, customer preferences, and competitive benchmarks to generate highly accurate, tailored pricing proposals in real time. Enhancing CRM systems with AI enables predictive lead scoring, automated follow-ups, and deeper customer insights, allowing sales teams to prioritize high-potential opportunities. These tools collectively accelerate deal closure, improve sales productivity, and free up time for sales teams to focus on strategic, high-value engagements like systematic account planning. 

Improving sales effectiveness: 

Beyond process efficiency, AI also enhances sales effectiveness by providing deep insights into customer behavior and deal performance. AI-powered Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) prediction helps sales teams identify high-value accounts and allocate resources more effectively. Additionally, AI-driven cross-sell and upsell recommendations empower inside sales teams with data-driven insights, enabling them to suggest the right products or services at the right time. By leveraging AI for customer and deal intelligence, companies can maximize revenue per customer and strengthen long-term relationships. 

AI is not confined to a single aspect of digital sales transformation—it spans the entire sales cycle. From optimizing go-to-market strategies to streamlining sales operations and improving customer engagement, AI-driven tools create a seamless, data-powered sales engine. By integrating AI across these three pillars, companies can enhance decision-making, increase sales efficiency, and achieve sustainable growth in an increasingly digital marketplace. 
 

3. Sales organization redesign – increasing effective customer development

To reorganize your sales organization, you start redefining your target markets and requirements. Using that knowledge, you can optimize roles and responsibilities to align with those target markets and requirements, after which core sales processes should be defined to further drive growth. 

Redefine your target markets and requirements:

In industrial manufacturing it is key to understand how products fulfill a customer need early on. While professional service firms can swiftly adapt their offering, manufacturers know that once their products are leaving the factory – it's hard to change them. Take the example of industrial battery solutions – designed to store electricity from various power sources, such as solar, wind or hydro. While that seems straightforward, there are dozens of product dimensions that need to be considered. How can we best connect to the local grid? What are the connection specifications? How many invertors need to be handled by the controller?   

Manufacturers that serve clients across different segments and regions understand that product requirements can greatly differ. Unfortunately, many industrial companies get stuck in producing 'whatever they have produced in the past’. Operational improvements are typically focused on efficiency gains, rather than creating more product value. The very first step in designing a successful sales organization is therefore ensuring that you have strategically defined target markets, map the product requirements, and connect the sales and product pipeline. Regardless of the sales set-up, it is not going to work if the product team and sales are not tightly connected. This can be achieved through a tight-knit product-sales relationship or establishing a product manager / category manager role.  

Optimize roles and responsibilities:

When thinking about sales team design, many companies get stuck in ‘role-thinking’. There will be discussions around hiring new technical sales functions or business development manager (BDM) without a clear understanding of what that role needs to achieve. Anyone who has switched jobs but in similar roles will tell you that job requirements differ between companies, and even within companies across divisions, entities, and regions. This results in two types of overlap that will reduce the effectiveness of your sales team:  

The solution is moving the towards a responsibility model, where the function is result of the key objective that person would need to fulfill. One helpful exercise to identify potential overlap is by having each commercial role write down their objective in one sentence, followed by 3-5 subobjectives that explain what they need to get that objective. Compare the results, and you will typically find that the objectives will often differ horizontally and overlap vertically.  

Define core sales processes:

Only once responsibilities (and thereby roles) have been clarified, can sales process optimization start. The goal is to ensure processes are designed in such a way that sales can do the best job possible.   

A common mistake on process optimization is that it typically focuses on adding rules and procedures that ensure people work in the same way. Often, this leads to an increase bureaucratic process, where sales need to log opportunities at inexcusable detail, need to inform dozens of support functions about a lead, and require access to multiple quoting tools and systems to negotiate a deal. The first step of optimizing sales is to understand how similar deal processes are across the organizations.   

In a market with highly common deal characteristics, process can often be improved by integrating tools and setting up central communication channels where all relevant team members automatically are informed about ongoing leads and their responsibilities. For example, as a lead moves through the funnel, sales support functions receive automated triggers for their support requirement. It is important to keep a transparent funnel – so each function knows what to expect. In these cases, it is mostly about training and enforcement, to create a uniform way of working.   

In a market with a more bespoke deal environment, e.g., project-based businesses where deal times and deal cycle can differ strongly, one can replace the above ‘swimming-lane model’ with ‘node-model’. The sales process requires more fluidity - and it is more important to define when certain pieces of information need to come together. Classifying the milestones in the sales process is much more important than logging the opportunity in each step of the way. This also increases the need for more informal touchpoints within the commercial team to ensure colleagues are aware of ongoing opportunities.  

Upskilling the commercial team:

While structure and systems are important, sales remains to be a people-business. Where B2B dealmaking is traditionally a relationship-driven practice, procurement organizations have taken the FMCG-approach by upskilling their buyers with analytical capabilities, supported by tools and data insights. This means that also traditional salespeople need to be trained in using data and analytics to convince and rebuttal against buyers. Through our work with hundreds of B2B commercial teams, we see that analytical capabilities are the biggest skill gap between sales and procurement organizations.