Strategic Imperatives for Transformation in the Conventional Sales Organization

Conventional sales organizations in many companies across the world are under intense scrutiny as a result of the pressure for enhanced productivity and the potential for replacing many traditional sales activities with Internet-based initiatives, as well as the escalating demands by major customers for superior value and new types of buyer-seller relationship. This paper identifies the transformation from conventional transactional sales activities to strategic customer management as a major challenge for executives. As a management agenda, the authors identify strategic sales imperatives of: involvement of sales in strategic decision making, deploying intelligence through enhanced market sensing capabilities, integration of cross-functional contributions into coherent value offers, internal marketing to 'sell' the demanding customer inside the organization, and infrastructure change in salesforce structure and process to implement new business strategies. This template provides a framework for managers to design the reformed sales organization as an important component of business strategy. A process of strategy realignment by top management, linked to designed change in the sales organization, and the implementation of change in salesforce structure and process by sales management is described.