Centralize Sales Teams For Powerful Returns

Trend alert: More businesses than ever are centralizing their sales teams, and they’re looking to cloud-based CRM to make that business change succeed.

Why centralize? Businesses need growth. And as the Harvard Business Review recently noted, the uncertain state of the global economy has been pushing leading businesses to fine-tune their sales organizations in pursuit of growth. According to HBR, the potential gains on offer are significant:

Optimizing sales operations with automated tools or dedicated back-office units for specific tasks can improve revenues by 10% to 25% and reduce back-office costs by 20% to 30%.

To put that another way, using CRM to support combined sales teams can lead to stronger sales and improved sales team efficiency. Finally, there’s a third benefit–improving customer-satisfaction levels, which helps retain customers–although for most businesses today, the customer experience seems to be less important than growth.

Case Studies: CRM-Powered Sales Team Centralization

Want to explore how centralizing your sales teams, backed by cloud-based CRM, can lead to better growth and productivity, and even customer service? Here’s why three Innoveer customers recently pursued just such a course:

Provide Single Sales Point For Customers

Earlier this year, electronic products manufacturer Panasonic merged three different business-to-business (B2B) divisions–handling 12 different product lines, including the company’s ruggedized Toughbook–in Europe into a single division with a combined revenue of approximately €1 billion ($1.3 billion). To support that merger, Panasonic worked with Innoveer to launch a Salesforce.com implementation for the new division’s consolidated sales team.

Why merge? For Panasonic, the driver was to improve efficiency–including sales efficiency–as well as to reduce marketing expenses, and to provide better customer service, not least via social media channels. Previously, some salespeople had used Salesforce.com to handle customer relationship management, while others had only used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Thanks to the new Salesforce.com application and revamped business processes, however, the company now has a “single version of the truth” for its B2B sales pipeline, and has already seen notable sales team efficiency improvements.

Identify New Cross-Selling Opportunities

Another Innoveer client, a medical device supply company, has several sales organizations inside the organization, each of which sells different types of products to relatively distinct customer sets. But rather than implementing separate CRM applications for each group, business leaders instead opted to implement a single instance of Salesforce.com for all sales teams.

Their thinking: even though each of the sales teams sells to different doctors and hospitals, having a single CRM application would promote collaboration between sales teams, increase overall efficiency, as well as help salespeople identify new opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling, as well as jointly selling to customers.

Supercharge Acquired Sales Teams

One Fortune 1000 Innoveer customer, meanwhile, is a high-technology firm with a core business, but which has also been buying additional businesses to augment its growth. While all of these businesses operate under the banner of the parent organization, in reality the acquired businesses run as independent entities–including separate sales teams.

Over time, however, senior managers want to consolidate the sales teams, so that fewer groups of sales teams will be selling a larger number of products. But at the same time, senior executives want to treat the acquired companies–and especially their sales teams–carefully, and not kill the golden goose, so to speak, by disrupting the teams’ entrepreneurial spirit and dynamic selling qualities.

Accordingly, the business has been implementing a single cloud-based CRM application for the entire organization. From a growth standpoint, the business anticipates that the single CRM system will provide salespeople with opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell existing customers. Furthermore, while most sales teams–at least for the moment–will continue to operate independently, having the new CRM system, backed by appropriate change management practices, is allowing the business to begin harmonizing sales processes across the different groups, thus laying the foundation for the future consolidation of more sales teams.

Learn More

Want to hear the best way to implement a sales force automation (SFA) program to bring together multiple business groups, as described by one of the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers? Or the top sales effectiveness or marketing automation questions–and answers–you should be asking, to make your current CRM program even better? For all this and more, check out videos from Innoveer.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Charles McCain.

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