Strategy 1 Get to growth opportunities before your competitors do 中

To grow sales, you’ve first got to start with an appetite for growth. Once you have that determination to grow and grow big, you then start figuring out where that future growth lies.

Tactic 1 Look 10 quarters ahead

Great companies do three interrelated things to capture the benefits of forward thinking when it comes to sales growth:

■ Surf the trends — Great sales leaders are aware of the big trends which are coming and figure out ways to position themselves advantageously. For example, everyone knows cloud computing is going to be very big in the future. Accordingly, smart sales leaders are starting to target small businesses with new pay-as-you-go business models which take full advantage of the capabilities of cloud computing. They make it their business to know which trends are coming and how those trends will impact on their customers and their industries in the future.

■ Invest ahead of demand — Sales leaders have forward-looking investment programs which see them investing in tapping into new growth opportunities as an explicit part of their annual budgeting process. They commit in advance to building sales capabilities so when demand emerges they’re ready to get into action. Many executives explicitly account for investment in new growth opportunities in their annual capacity planning and allow 2 to 4 percent of their overall sales budget for this purpose.

■ Have a habit of turning insights into action — Successful sales leaders make forward planning an integral part of their job description. They make their own luck by identifying the sales opportunities which will materialize in the next 12-to 18-months or longer and position their companies to pounce on those opportunities. They have a very forward-looking approach to sales and a track record of success which gives them credibility. By acting on new opportunities, they get the jump on others who are simply reacting to the marketplace as it changes and evolves.

Key Thoughts

“Building and sustaining the capability to take a forward-looking view of the market is not easy. As we looked across all of these great sellers, two common characteristics emerged: the mindset of sales leadership and resource commitment. Sales leaders must consistently monitor the macro-environment in search of sales opportunities. Even good sales leaders find this challenging, given the relentless pressure to hit near-term targets. This is why resource commitment is important.”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark

● Tactic 2 Mine beneath the surface

Successful sales leaders are highly proactive in mining the growth which lies right underneath their feet, even in what seem to be very mature markets. This micro-market approach to growth generally involves doing three things:

■ Find the pockets of growth — Many companies are generating growth by breaking large markets down into micro-markets and then identifying which of those niche markets are poised to grow in the immediate future. Put differently, a broad brush approach generally doesn’t lead you to the most lucrative hot spots. Sales leaders break their markets down, figure out where their best opportunities lie and then get busy selling to those micro-markets. Identify your most attractive pockets of growth and focus on those.

■ Look beyond sales to generate growth — Once you’ve identified your micro-markets with the greatest growth potential, what will often turn your insights into sales will be the involvement of other parts of your organization. Collaboration across functions is often of vital importance in tapping into that growth potential. For example, one European telecom company analyzed its customer data to a very detailed level and developed tailored value propositions which its customer service agents could use to pitch customers who rang up for service support. That generated a 35 percent increase in call center revenue within six weeks of implementation. Turning inbound service calls into sales had never been attempted before but it was a growth opportunity which was lying hidden in plain sight and which became accessible once other functions were brought into the mix.

■ Keep it easy for the sales team — One company found its best sales rep was spending 75 percent of her time in an area where less than a quarter of her sales region’s opportunities were located. The reason? Sales territories had been assigned on the basis of historical performance rather than immediate growth prospects. By realigning her territory to where 75 percent of the opportunity exists, her numbers have jumped upwards. For the mining micro-markets approach to generate growth, complexity must be minimized. If at all possible, develop a simple dashboard which allows sales teams to understand key metrics and react immediately. Ideally, you want sales reps to be able to make pricing decisions on the fly based on that dashboard.

Key Thoughts

Micro-market strategies give sales leaders a powerful way to find growth ahead of their competitors. The sales leaders we interviewed across a range of sectors agreed that taking this sort of granular approach to growth is essential in deciding where to compete and in translating market insights into actions. The most successful sales leaders were extremely proactive in mining the growth that lay right beneath their feet in what seemed to be mature markets.”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark

● Tactic 3 Find growth in your data

While it’s easy for sales leaders to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data which is available to most organizations these days, the reality is big data holds the potential to generate numerous insights which can increase sales.

Key Thoughts

“What does big data mean for sales management? It is a way to move beyond the traditional customer relationship management (CRM) tools and can help with microsegmentation, sentiment analysis, customizing cross-selling, and—with the rise of smart phones and other mobile data devices—location-based selling (for example, pushing real-time offers based on the consumer’s whereabouts).”

— Thomas Baumgartner, Homayoun Hatami and Jon Vander Ark

Some suggestions for turning data into revenue:

■ Harvest every source of data — Create more opportunities for customers to tell you about themselves. Partner with external providers if possible and then work to generate insights through analytics of their data. Even offbeat sources of data like chatter on social networks can be helpful if understood. Accessing a supplier’s data may also deliver some worthwhile intelligence about customer preferences.

■ Get personal in your selling — Make use of sophisticated microsegmentation analysis to create tailored selling propositions and approaches which will precisely meet your buyer’s needs. Use data to forecast customer trends and to develop customer reward programs that will encourage future purchases. Amazon.com’s “customers who bought this item also bought …” recommendation engine has proven to be enormously successful and is generally credited with increasing sales by 20-to 30-percent.

■ Put data at center — Make the availability of data, the systematic investigation of growth opportunities and decisions based on that data cornerstones of your sales strategy. This may lead to genuinely novel ways of selling which allow your firm to outsell your competitors. An example of this is Mint.com, Intuit’s personal finance subsidiary. Mint offers a free service to Intuit’s 5 million customers where customers see a consolidated view of their finances across all products, even those managed by other firms. If customers have cash sitting in multiple accounts earning no interest, Mint flags that and recommends pooling cash into a single account earning competitive interest rates — generating a finder’s fee for Mint. If a customer’s spending and savings patterns indicate unprotected assets, Mint might recommend an insurance policy which would generate a finder’s fee for Mint from the insurance company. The idea here is to use big data in smart ways to create new sales propositions, to enhance existing sales relationships and to come up with new sales models.