Sales & Channel Management

We help clients make lasting improvements to the effectiveness of their sales investments and interactions with customers across all channels to drive sales growth.

Our approach to sales transformations encompasses how and to whom companies sell their products and services, the channels they use, and the back-office operations that support these efforts. Where necessary and appropriate, we also help clients address specific challenges in their go-to-market strategy, sales-force effectiveness, key-account management, and other relevant areas. Our team consists of more than 80 partners and associate partners, and a broader affiliated group of more than 150 senior practitioners worldwide.

What we do

Our approach extends from quick targeted interventions that unlock value (e.g., improving a client’s key-account management program) to more holistic sales transformations focused on architecture, execution, and skill-building opportunities across the client's entire go-to-market model:

• Optimize return on sales investments. Cutting sales costs without losing revenue is both art and science. Our collaborative approach helps companies gain transparency on the performance of their route-to-market mix while identifying potential improvement areas and concrete ways to achieve them, such as creating lean back-office sales operations.
• Find and capture pockets of “granular growth.” Nearly every company with a dispersed customer base and a large number of sales transactions has considerable opportunity for organic growth if it looks at the right level of granularity. We help companies take a fine-grained view by geography, industry segment, and offerings to find the hidden pockets of growth—including often overlooked small and medium-sized business segments—and then tailor the strategies and approaches needed to capture them.
• Align sales channels in a multichannel world. Customers are increasingly moving across all channels to get what they want. Some of them demand increased services for certain transactions while others prefer low-touch, 24/7 interactions. We help companies form effective selling strategies in all channels from key-account management to digital sales to indirect channel partners. Clients base these strategies on precise assessments of channel performance, channel economics, and customer preferences.
• Building the high-performing sales force. Today’s big company sales organizations often consist of thousands of people spread across vast geographies. To boost the effectiveness of these far-flung organizations, we help build necessary skills in the organization by providing innovative, hands-on programs that include performance dialogues, train-the-trainer capability building, and a “field and forum” approach for sales managers that combines classroom and on-the-job learning. This component is critical in achieving sustained improvement.

Examples of our work

• worked with a global high-tech company to redesign its sales model, boosting productive field seller time by 25 percent and reducing cycle time and errors in sales support
• helped a retail bank improve salesforce efficiency, leading to a 20 percent sales increase and 40 percent more cross-selling by tellers in the first two months following the engagement
• designed a new go-to-market model for a global data communications player, reducing selling, general and administrative costs by 20 percent over 18 months