Disruptive CMO Marketing

Maximize consumer insights with your sales department

With the right training sales people should become a natural source for first hand consumer insights. They need to look at three elements:
- insights generated from consumer contact
- insights generated from shoppers
- generating insights based on sales or customer analysis

Insights generated from consumer contacts
This is of course the biggest and easiest to formalize the generated insights. First, a process needs to be in place where interesting feedback from both outlet staff and shopping consumers, get captured into the sales report. Balance need to be kept to avoid too much paper filling. You could set weekly objectives like ask these questions to 10 people in your category aile and provide a summary of the feedback by end of week. This can easily be integrated into the handheld programs.

Generating insights based on sales or customer analysis
There are several information points available to the sales department: discussions with retailers, retailers' data, regional analysis and coporate generated insights. The trick is to provide them the relevant cut of the data or insights. Not the research report. In addition, the data needs to be cut by preference for their region. National averages may be interesting to know, but becomes much more powerful when compared to their local performance.
The national account teams or regional sales teams can also provide better insights into how a certain program worked in different channels so the insights are channel specific. They link consumer insights to channel specific shopping insights to the sales consumer drivers.

It is important to have a structured approach. This means fixed meetings, consumer insights need to be part of sales planning data as well as objective setting to the right sales consumer drivers. Key is that they feel responsible for influencing consumers and that they don't think this is for the marketing teams.

How to create an ideal sales organization?

It is not easy to get a smooth running sales organization. There is always room for further improvements. These are some of the problems I come accross:

• High cost per lead and lack of quality leads to fill the pipeline
• Limited use of marketing materials by selling organizations
• Steep discounts to win in competitive situations
• Gaps in fundamental selling skills and process discipline

Just before you think that the problems are only about the sales approach, make sure that you assess the other parts of the commercial function. Often there are more deeper problems that might just get blamed on the sales function.

So if indeed the sales function needs tinkering, look at this framework of interlinked points to think about when you want to optimize your sales organization.