Holger Dannenberg

Führung im Vertrieb

In vielen Vertriebsmannschaften finden wir immer noch das klassische Bild eines Verkaufers vor: Individuell, eigensinnig, intuitiv, schwer steuerbar. Wir haben an verschiedenen Stellen des Buches ausgefuhrt, dass diese Sicht im Sinne einer hohen Professionalitat im Verkauf deutlich zu kurz greift. Verkauf und Verkaufer konnen und mussen gesteuert und gefuhrt werden. Ob es den Betroffenen gefallt oder nicht. Zugleich sind wir auch der Meinung, dass eine professionelle Fuhrung fur alle Beteiligten zu besseren Ergebnissen fuhrt als isolierte Arbeit. In diesem Abschnitt widmen wir uns daher drei Aspekten, die aus unserer Sicht fur die Fuhrung des Vertriebs wichtig sind: Fuhrungsstil, Fuhrungsspanne und der Rolle der Fuhrungskraft als Coach.

Execution of sales work

Until now we have primarily analysed the concepts, structures and instruments important for achieving excellence in sales and customer management. Now we will examine their implementation in direct customer contact between sales employees and customers. Sales remains a truly human process - despite its technical instruments and automation. Customers never make purely rational decisions. Salespeople will continue to exercise great influence on the purchase decision. In addition, they will increasingly become part of the performance and service themselves through complex forms of cooperation. The issue is how sales employees position themselves with customers in certain sales situations and how they adapt their sales styles to those different situations. Do they tend to be passive or (pro)active?

Designing sales processes

The definition of detailed targets for the retention, expansion or acquisition of new customers is a basic requirement for systematic sales work. These targets must then be used to drive concrete activities that combine to create different sales processes. Because sales personnel can only perform and sales managers can only manage concrete activities.

Digression: What salespersons can learn from top athletes

Now let us indulge in a small digression. As we worked on this book we became aware of a number of parallels between excellence in sales and customer management, and excellence in sports. We subsequently examined this subject in more detail. One of the German Mercuri consultants and trainers, Christian Schulte, had played in the German national hockey team for many years, winning two world championships as well as a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Athens. He helped us to transfer the principles of top athletes to salespersons.

Introduction: Excellence in sales and customer management

Mercuri International, as the leading European sales consultation and training company, carried out one of the major international studies into success factors for excellence in sales together with the Institute of Marketing and Retailing from the University of St. Gallen in Autumn 2006. On the basis of this study we identified how companies can achieve excellence in sales and customer management.

The top 10 success factors for sales excellence

Initially we were interested in which aspects of sales management most strikingly differentiated the high performers from the low performers. For this purpose we compared the differences in answers to questions between the high performers and low performers, as well as the average. The ten success factors we identified differentiate the company groups the most. In other words, the top performers utilise these aspects more frequently and more professionally. Using this approach we were able to identify a large number of clear success factors. The ten most important are shown in the illustration below. They will be covered and briefly explained (Dannenberg/Zupancic 2007) in the following sections. Further details will be provided in the course of this book.

The interrelationship of marketing and sales strategies

In the previous chapter we explained how factors relevant to sales should be built into the corporate strategy. The goals for other strategies, e.g. functional, product-relevant or regional, are then derived from the corporate strategy. In practice, we encounter numerous approaches to the interplay of various strategies within the company that are neither logically conceived nor can they be practically implemented with any success. Therefore in the following chapter we want to offer guidance as to how marketing and sales strategies relate to each other and should be developed. While the marketing department should set the goals for the sales strategy, on the other hand these goals require such a highly detailed knowledge of the market that they cannot realistically be developed and disseminated via a top-down process.

Management in sales

In many sales teams we still encounter the classic image of a salesperson: individual, headstrong, intuitive and difficult to control. At various points in this book we have remarked that this picture is one of unprofessional sales. Sales and salespeople can and must be controlled and managed, whether the individuals concerned like this or not. We believe that professional management as opposed to isolated work achieves better results for everyone concerned. We will therefore devote this section to three areas that we regard as important for sales management: management style, span of control and the role of the manager as coach.

Excellence in sales is an issue for the entire company

Excellence in sales and customer management are not matters that solely concern sales employees. There is hardly a department that does not contribute towards the success of sales. The times are long past in which selling products and services was exclusively the task of the sales department. Today, there are numerous levels of contact that can have a considerable effect on sales success, between companies and customers outside sales. Thus every department and every employee within a company is directly or indirectly responsible for achieving excellence in sales (Briody 2007, p.36).

Sales strategy information base

Every professional strategy is based on good analysis. The same applies to the sales strategy. The available instruments and tools are similar to those used in the corporate and marketing strategies. The corporate strategy specifies the customers and competitors as part of the definition of the relevant market. The marketing strategy should already be based upon an analysis of market segments. In the text that follows, therefore, we do not want to repeat information from standard textbooks on analysis for corporate and marketing strategies. A number of established sources already exist for this purpose. We will only explain those instruments and content we regard as being particularly relevant to the sales strategy.