Microsoft Executive Roundtable - Improving Sales Performance
On the 24th May 2012 Mercuri Urval together with Exentive and Microsoft hosted a Sales Transformation forum that brought together sales leaders and like minded professionals to the Microsoft Customer Centre in London to discuss how to transform sales results.
With constant economic pressures and limited scope to further reduce costs, businesses need their sales functions to grow sustainable and profitable revenues. The panellists provided an insight into how to identify and implement the right sales capabilities in order to improve competitiveness.
Mercuri Urval’s Lesley Abery described step changes to building tomorrow’s Sales Force. She emphasised that executives have to be aligned in their understanding of how they make money, what their future business model should be, what they expect of the organisation and how they lead.
Lesley also highlighted that the journey is difficult and requires a fresh look at the business model and an objective critique of the sales function’s future capabilities. Central to the discussions was the requirement to define goals for businesses before deciding; which clients to focus on, how and with what quantity and quality of resource. To do this a review of skills and capabilities is needed in order to identify whether a programme is needed that can close capability gaps through the application of new strategies, processes and skills.
The wider debate within the forum agreed that sales transformation is a constant activity that doesn’t stop and start and that success is likely to be much greater if people are consulted and included in deciding what needs to be done to improve future sales results, how and why.
Nick Charles of Exentive also provided a comprehensive guide to holistic software solutions to better calculate and monitor sales reward systems in order to manage incentives and resources more efficiently. This prompted contributions about the return on investment of such systems and the visibility of dashboards to employees within the organisation.
The forum was a great success with some really productive conversations. The key themes generated by the attendees concerned the need to engage customers on multiple levels in order to align the sales strategy with customer strategy.