Sales force effectiveness-related work is extremely pragmatic and actionable. This approach focuses on practical solutions that can be immediately implemented to drive tangible results. Learn about the five key strategies that companies can adopt to achieve significant growth and enhance operational efficiency. These strategies are designed to improve optimization, ensuring that businesses can fully leverage capabilities to monitor performance, streamline processes, and improve customer interactions. By implementing these actionable insights, companies can not only boost their productivity but also drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention.

Whether you’re talking about a founder-led business taking on an investment for the first time or a Fortune 500 business whose financial performance has stagnated, there are significant, continuous growth expectations. In fact, 63% of companies we recently surveyed consider growth a top priority. 

Much of the growth can come from just selling better and having better commercial execution — that is improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the commercial engine.

What I love about this work is that I get to dispel the perceptions that consultants create PowerPoint documents, which collect dust and don’t lead to impact.

Hi, I’m Kevin Berger and I’m a partner based out of Chicago in Oliver Wyman’s Pricing, Sales, and Marketing and Private Capital Practices. I’ve spent the majority of my career driving profitable revenue growth for my clients and their financial investors through commercial effectiveness-related work, including go-to-market model design and transformation, salesforce effectiveness, and pricing optimization.

There are a number of powerful sales force effectiveness levers. I’m going to talk about five key ones that most businesses can pull to achieve meaningful growth, and the associated questions every business should be asking itself.

The first lever is ensuring clarity around the market opportunity. Everything starts with the market. Have you identified the segments where your value proposition is differentiated and you have a chance to win? Are you leveraging data-driven, predictive targeting methods to prioritize accounts and prospects where you’re most likely to be successful? By addressing those questions, you can be confident that you’re allocating your most valuable selling resources in the most effective way.

Number two is designing the right sales org model to cover the market opportunity effectively and efficiently. This is about having the right mix of roles to both win new logos and more deeply penetrate and cross-sell to existing customers. These roles need to be well-aligned to how customers like to buy.

You should consider whether you have the right resourcing and coverage model in place to support the growth ambition, and if not, whether there’s a plan for how to effectively scale. And are you reviewing and rebalancing the plan at least once a year?

The third lever is optimizing the sales motion to increase win rates. That is, sufficiently filling the top of the funnel with high-quality leads. Leveraging a marketing and business development capability to support the sales team. And most importantly keeping your sales reps unencumbered by non-value add tasks so they can spend their time covering the most promising opportunities.

Asking the questions:What can be automated? What can be offloaded to lower-paid resources?  What can just be eliminated?

Number four is maximizing the value of existing customer relationships. This involves having the right account management and customer success capability in place to drive retention and cross-selling.

Ask yourself: Have you established a well-disciplined account planning process?  Have you mapped out the whitespace potential?  Do you use data to inform a “next best action” engine so that account managers know what conversations to have with customers?

You want a customer success function that is proactively monitoring usage and customer satisfaction and educating customers on how to get maximum value from the offering without coming across as overly commercial. This a critical discipline to drive sufficient gross and net retention levels.

The fifth and final lever is enabling the sales team to maximize productivity. It starts with having the right sales enablers — the tools and techniques — in place. For example, great sales managers can typically raise the tide for all sales reps. Do you have the right sales management cadence to develop and coach your reps?

You also must ask: Do you have a sales ops function in place to perform functions like measuring performance, collecting market intel, and managing CRM and other sales tools? And do you have the right incentives in place to attract the right talent and motivate the right set of behaviors?

This is what gets me super excited.  Helping clients identify these opportunities and figuring out how to implement them.

Sales force effectiveness-related work is super pragmatic and actionable. You can start on it today and see results tomorrow!

I’m Kevin Berger and this is my take on sales force effectiveness.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Sales force effectiveness-related work is extremely pragmatic and actionable. This approach focuses on practical solutions that can be immediately implemented to drive tangible results. Learn about the five key strategies that companies can adopt to achieve significant growth and enhance operational efficiency. These strategies are designed to improve optimization, ensuring that businesses can fully leverage capabilities to monitor performance, streamline processes, and improve customer interactions. By implementing these actionable insights, companies can not only boost their productivity but also drive higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention.

Whether you’re talking about a founder-led business taking on an investment for the first time or a Fortune 500 business whose financial performance has stagnated, there are significant, continuous growth expectations. In fact, 63% of companies we recently surveyed consider growth a top priority. 

Much of the growth can come from just selling better and having better commercial execution — that is improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the commercial engine.

What I love about this work is that I get to dispel the perceptions that consultants create PowerPoint documents, which collect dust and don’t lead to impact.

Hi, I’m Kevin Berger and I’m a partner based out of Chicago in Oliver Wyman’s Pricing, Sales, and Marketing and Private Capital Practices. I’ve spent the majority of my career driving profitable revenue growth for my clients and their financial investors through commercial effectiveness-related work, including go-to-market model design and transformation, salesforce effectiveness, and pricing optimization.

There are a number of powerful sales force effectiveness levers. I’m going to talk about five key ones that most businesses can pull to achieve meaningful growth, and the associated questions every business should be asking itself.

The first lever is ensuring clarity around the market opportunity. Everything starts with the market. Have you identified the segments where your value proposition is differentiated and you have a chance to win? Are you leveraging data-driven, predictive targeting methods to prioritize accounts and prospects where you’re most likely to be successful? By addressing those questions, you can be confident that you’re allocating your most valuable selling resources in the most effective way.

Number two is designing the right sales org model to cover the market opportunity effectively and efficiently. This is about having the right mix of roles to both win new logos and more deeply penetrate and cross-sell to existing customers. These roles need to be well-aligned to how customers like to buy.

You should consider whether you have the right resourcing and coverage model in place to support the growth ambition, and if not, whether there’s a plan for how to effectively scale. And are you reviewing and rebalancing the plan at least once a year?

The third lever is optimizing the sales motion to increase win rates. That is, sufficiently filling the top of the funnel with high-quality leads. Leveraging a marketing and business development capability to support the sales team. And most importantly keeping your sales reps unencumbered by non-value add tasks so they can spend their time covering the most promising opportunities.

Asking the questions:What can be automated? What can be offloaded to lower-paid resources?  What can just be eliminated?

Number four is maximizing the value of existing customer relationships. This involves having the right account management and customer success capability in place to drive retention and cross-selling.

Ask yourself: Have you established a well-disciplined account planning process?  Have you mapped out the whitespace potential?  Do you use data to inform a “next best action” engine so that account managers know what conversations to have with customers?

You want a customer success function that is proactively monitoring usage and customer satisfaction and educating customers on how to get maximum value from the offering without coming across as overly commercial. This a critical discipline to drive sufficient gross and net retention levels.

The fifth and final lever is enabling the sales team to maximize productivity. It starts with having the right sales enablers — the tools and techniques — in place. For example, great sales managers can typically raise the tide for all sales reps. Do you have the right sales management cadence to develop and coach your reps?

You also must ask: Do you have a sales ops function in place to perform functions like measuring performance, collecting market intel, and managing CRM and other sales tools? And do you have the right incentives in place to attract the right talent and motivate the right set of behaviors?

This is what gets me super excited.  Helping clients identify these opportunities and figuring out how to implement them.

Sales force effectiveness-related work is super pragmatic and actionable. You can start on it today and see results tomorrow!

I’m Kevin Berger and this is my take on sales force effectiveness.

The transcript has been edited for clarity.