Building an Unbeatable Sales Force: The Competitive Advantage No One Can Copy

April 19, 2025

Building an Unbeatable Sales Force: The Competitive Advantage No One Can Copy

CHANGE / SALES EXCELLENCE / SALES TRAINING

19. April, 2025

In today's volatile marketplace, where fleeting trends and disruptive technologies reign supreme, the quest for enduring competitive advantage has become a relentless pursuit. Many organizations focus on outsmarting the competition, chasing the latest market hacks, or acquiring cutting-edge tools. Yet, the most sustainable form of competitive advantage lies not in what you get, but in what you build. Specifically, a high-performing, strategically managed sales force can serve as an unassailable fortress, shielding your business from commoditization and imitation.

Beyond External Analysis: Unleashing Internal Potential

While external factors, such as market dynamics and competitive landscapes, undoubtedly influence business success, a sole focus on these aspects provides an incomplete picture. Organizations that achieve lasting competitive advantage recognize the power of internal resources and capabilities. These resources, when viewed through the lens of value, rareness, imitability, and organization, can transform your sales force into an unstoppable engine of growth.

Value: Does your sales force possess the skills and knowledge to effectively seize opportunities and neutralize threats in the marketplace?

Rareness: Are your sales practices and strategies unique, setting you apart from the competition?

Imitability: Can competitors easily replicate your sales approach, culture, and talent?

Organization: Are your structures, systems, and policies aligned to support and empower your sales force to maximize their impact?

When these questions are answered affirmatively, your sales force transcends its traditional role and becomes a potent source of competitive differentiation.

The Human Factor: The Uncopyable Asset

In an era where technological advancements and operational efficiencies are readily accessible, the human element emerges as the most difficult asset to replicate. The way you manage, develop, and empower your sales force is often subtle, deeply embedded in your organizational culture, and nearly invisible to outsiders. This “human edge” isn’t about generic best practices; it’s about a cohesive set of principles and practices that, when executed in harmony, create a formidable barrier to imitation.
The Thirteen Pillars of Sales Excellence

As highlighted by Pfeffer (1995), several key practices characterize organizations that excel through effective people management. When strategically applied to your sales force, these pillars can unlock unprecedented levels of performance and competitive advantage:

1. Employment Security: Cultivate a culture of long-term commitment and mutual loyalty. When salespeople feel secure in their roles, they are more likely to invest their time and energy in building lasting relationships and driving long-term results.

2. Selective Recruiting: Rigorously select the best talent. By setting a high bar for entry, you create a sense of prestige and belonging, attracting top performers who are driven to excel.

3. High Wages: Invest in competitive compensation. Higher wages not only attract skilled professionals but also send a powerful message that the organization values its salespeople and their contributions.

4. Incentive Pay: Align rewards with performance. When salespeople directly benefit from their success, they are more motivated to go the extra mile and exceed expectations.

5. Employee Ownership: Foster a sense of ownership. Granting salespeople a stake in the company’s success aligns their interests with those of the organization and encourages a long-term perspective.

6. Information Sharing: Empower with knowledge. Equip your sales force with the data, insights, and market intelligence they need to make informed decisions and effectively serve customers.

7. Participation and Empowerment: Encourage involvement. Involve salespeople in shaping their work processes and decision-making. Empowerment fosters a sense of ownership and drives innovation.

8. Self-Managed Teams: Leverage collaborative power. Empower sales teams to manage their own performance and drive accountability through peer monitoring and shared goals.

9. Training and Skills Development: Invest in continuous growth. Provide ongoing training and development opportunities to ensure that your sales force remains at the forefront of their profession.

10. Cross-Utilization and Cross-Training: Cultivate versatility. Encourage salespeople to develop multiple skills and take on diverse roles, enhancing their job satisfaction and organizational agility.

11. Symbolic Egalitarianism: Foster a culture of respect. Promote a sense of equality and shared purpose throughout the organization, signaling that everyone’s contribution is valued.

12. Wage Compression: Minimize internal competition. In collaborative sales environments, reducing pay disparities can foster teamwork and enhance overall efficiency.

13. Promotion from Within: Nurture internal talent. Offering clear paths for advancement incentivizes professional development and ensures that future leaders understand your culture and values.

The Power of Measurement and Coherent Philosophy

To ensure that these practices drive tangible results, it’s essential to establish clear metrics and track progress consistently. Measurement provides feedback, promotes accountability, and signals what the organization truly values. More importantly, successful organizations integrate these practices into an overarching management philosophy, creating a unified approach that fosters resilience, adaptability, and clarity.

Ready to Transform Your Sales Force?

In a hyper-competitive landscape, building an unbeatable sales force is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. By focusing on the human element, aligning your organizational structure, and fostering a culture of empowerment and excellence, you can transform your sales team into an unassailable competitive weapon.

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your sales force and create a competitive advantage that others can only envy?

Contact us today to learn how our customized training solutions can help you build a team that thrives in any market condition.

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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Strategic Renewal in Action: Navigating the Redesign Phase of Change Management

April 18, 2025

Strategic Renewal in Action: Navigating the Redesign Phase of Change Management

CHANGE / SALES EXCELLENCE

18. April, 2025

In our previous article, we explored the assessment phase of a change management program, focusing on strategic customer renewal. We shared actionable insights and offered our Strategic Renewal Guide to help organizations evaluate their sales processes and align with customer needs. Now, it’s time to move forward—this article dives into the redesign phase, where the real transformation begins. The redesign phase is where vision meets execution. It’s about reshaping your sales organization to thrive in a dynamic marketplace, addressing leadership, strategy, processes, and technology. Let’s explore how to master this critical stage of change management.

Mastering the Redesign Phase: Where Change Takes Shape

After assessing the environment in which customers buy, organizations must move into the redesign phase—a decisive step toward building a high-performing sales team. This phase often requires transformation in four key areas:

Leadership and Management Skills: Leading from the Front

Change starts at the top. To meet evolving customer demands—especially those from larger and strategic clients—leaders must embrace agility and adaptability. Customers increasingly impose stringent requirements on suppliers, demanding innovative solutions and seamless collaboration.

Effective leadership during this phase involves developing:

Financial expertise for value-driven decision-making.

Advanced communication skills across teams and geographies.

Cross-functional and cross-country coordination to align resources with customer needs.

Consensus-building capabilities to foster collaboration within and across organizations.

When leadership sets the tone for change, it empowers teams to rise to new challenges and deliver exceptional results.

Sales Strategy: Targeting Growth Opportunities

A well-crafted sales strategy is the backbone of organizational success. It defines how resources are deployed to target customers with the right products, services, and solutions. At its core lies customer segmentation, a powerful tool that identifies high-potential customers and aligns them with tailored solutions.

Why does segmentation matter? Because different customers offer varying growth and profit potential—and when matched with optimized sales channels and strategies, organizations can achieve accelerated revenue growth and productivity gains. Yet, segmentation is often overlooked, falling into the gap between sales and marketing responsibilities. Bridging this gap unlocks opportunities for sustainable growth while ensuring resources are allocated effectively.

Sales Processes: Redefining How You Sell

To achieve strategic objectives, companies often need to rethink how they sell—whether to existing customers, new customers, or both. Redesigning sales processes can also lead to redefining roles within the organization.

For example:

A company may shift from deploying product specialists to account or solution specialists who collaborate with technical experts to better serve customers.

Structural changes may follow process adjustments, ensuring alignment between customer orientation, strategy, and execution.

By reshaping processes and roles, organizations can create a more agile and customer-focused sales force that drives results.

Technology and Sales Support Programs: Energizing Performance

Technology and support programs are essential for empowering sales teams during organizational redesigns. Training initiatives, performance-based compensation structures, rewards systems, AI-driven tools, automation platforms, and supervisory frameworks all play a vital role in energizing teams and sustaining success.

Investing in these areas ensures that your sales force has the tools it needs to adapt quickly and perform at its best in an ever-changing market.

Are you ready to take your sales organization to the next level?

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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Guide for Strategic Renewal

March 31, 2025

Guide for Strategic Renewal

CHANGE / ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION / by Inna Hüessmanns

31. March, 2025

This guide focuses on the critical components of the assessment phase, with a specific emphasis on strategic customer renewal as the foundation for driving meaningful change.

Our guide on strategic customer renewal serves as a starting point to help you transform your sales organization. It is designed to be a valuable resource as you embark on your change management journey, offering insights to evaluate your current approach and identify opportunities for growth.

Strategic renewal is an ongoing process that requires thoughtful planning, collaboration, and adaptability. By applying the principles outlined here, you can begin to align your organization’s efforts with long-term success and strengthen relationships with the customers who matter most.

Request our free guide for strategic renewal at ih@i-g-solutions.de

Take the First Step Towards Strategic Renewal:

Contact us to help you with the assessment, redesign, measurement, and implementation stages of your change program. Reach out for a complimentary 60-minute consultation.

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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Reimagining Sales Excellence: A Strategic Renewal Framework for High-Performance Organizations

March 31, 2025

Reimagining Sales Excellence: A Strategic Renewal Framework for High-Performance Organizations

CHANGE / ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION / by Inna Hüessmanns

31. March, 2025

Achieving and sustaining high sales performance demands more than incremental improvements. It requires a fundamental shift in perspective—a strategic renewal focused on aligning your sales organization with the evolving needs and expectations of your most valuable customers. This is not merely about adapting to change; it's about proactively shaping your sales strategy to seize opportunities and outperform the competition.

What Defines a High-Performance Sales Organization?

A high-performance sales organization is characterized by its ability to consistently exceed customer expectations while outpacing competitors in key metrics. These organizations excel at:

Accelerated Revenue Growth: Achieving revenue growth rates that surpass industry averages.

Successful New Product Launches: Seamlessly introducing and gaining market adoption for innovative products.

Strategic Customer Acquisition: Consistently attracting and securing significant new customer accounts.

Exceptional Customer Retention: Maintaining high levels of customer loyalty and minimizing churn.

Effective Account Penetration: Expanding their footprint within existing accounts by selling across multiple buying centers.

Talent Retention: Cultivating a culture that attracts and retains top sales professionals.

Optimized Sales Expenses: Maintaining sales expense ratios below industry averages.

These characteristics are not merely aspirational goals; they are the tangible outcomes of a deliberate and well-executed strategic framework.

Navigating Change: A Systematic Approach

Sales organization change management programs involve a strategic realignment of resources to effectively serve the most valuable customers. This requires sales leaders to challenge existing assumptions and embrace a customer-centric mindset. Academic research highlights that successful change programs typically follow a structured five-step process:

Assessment: Thoroughly evaluating the current state of the sales organization and the external market environment.

Redesign: Reconfiguring sales processes, structures, and strategies to align with customer needs.

Measurement: Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress and measure the impact of changes.

Sales Support Programs: Implementing training, technology, and resources to empower the sales team.

Implementation: Executing the redesigned sales strategy and continuously monitoring performance.

The Critical Assessment Phase

The assessment phase is crucial for understanding the evolving customer landscape. It requires acknowledging that customers are changing how they buy and conduct business. If organizations fail to adapt, they risk becoming obsolete.

While customer focus is vital, sales organization change initiatives involve much more than segmentation. Change management also encompasses key account management, sales competencies of salespeople and sales managers, lead generation, market orientation, sales strategy, and sales processes, among other areas. These elements are critical to building a high-performing sales organization, and each requires its own dedicated assessment and strategy for improvement. Additionally, there are several other areas of assessment that may vary depending on the unique needs and goals of the organization, highlighting the importance of tailoring change initiatives to specific circumstances.

This article focuses on the critical components of the assessment phase, with a specific emphasis on strategic customer renewal as the foundation for driving meaningful change.

Defining a Clear Change Vision

Companies embarking on change management programs must have a clear vision of their desired future state. This vision should:

Prioritize Long-Term Results: Avoid the temptation to pursue short-term gains at the expense of long-term strategic goals.

Engage the Sales Force: Secure buy-in from the field sales force early in the process.

Prepare Management: Equip management with the skills and knowledge to effectively lead the change initiative.

Start Small and Scale: Begin with targeted initiatives and gradually expand the scope of the program based on results.

Steps to Effective Change

To successfully implement change, organizations should follow these steps:

Mobilize Commitment: Engage employees in a joint diagnosis of business problems.

Develop a Shared Vision: Create a shared understanding of how to organize and manage for competitiveness.

Foster Consensus and Competence: Build consensus around the new vision and equip employees with the necessary skills.

Spread Revitalization: Extend the change initiative to all departments without top-down pressure.

Institutionalize Revitalization: Embed new processes and systems into the organization’s culture.

Monitor and Adjust: Continuously monitor progress and adapt strategies based on feedback and results.

The Benefits of a Results-Driven Approach

A results-driven approach to change management offers several key benefits:

Targeted Innovation: Implement managerial and process innovations only when they are demonstrably needed.

Empirical Testing: Measure the impact of each change to determine its effectiveness.

Frequent Reinforcement: Motivate employees with short-term, tangible results.

Continuous Learning: Build on the lessons learned in each phase to continuously improve the process.

Customer Focus: The Cornerstone of Success

Being customer-focused involves aligning selling strategies and tactics with customers’ buying processes. This requires regularly examining buyer segments and adapting to changing customer requirements.

Strategic Renewal of Customers

One effective methodology for evaluating customers involves characterizing them according to three dimensions:

Strategic Impact: The customer’s importance to the supplier organization’s long-term strategy.

Significance: The customer’s overall contribution to the supplier organization’s revenue and growth.

Profitability: The customer’s profitability, considering all associated costs.

Our guide for strategic customer renewal serves as a starting point to help you transform your sales organization. It is designed to be a valuable resource as you embark on your change management journey, offering insights to evaluate your current approach and identify opportunities for growth.

Take the First Step Towards Strategic Renewal:

Ready to transform your sales organization and achieve sustainable high performance?

Contact us to help you with the assessment, redesign, measurement, and implementation stages of your change program. Reach out for a complimentary 60-minute consultation.

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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The Growth Trajectory: Mastering Organizational Transformation

January 24, 2025

The Growth Trajectory: Mastering Organizational Transformation

TRANSFORMATION / by Inna Hüessmanns

24. January, 2025

The business life cycle is a crucial concept for understanding organizational growth and the challenges companies face at different stages.

What works in the early stages of the business may not work in their mature stages. While this article outlines four stages (start-up, revenue growth, market share, and optimization), it is important to note that various models exist, with some sources identifying five stages of the company life cycle. Regardless of the specific model, the key takeaway is that organizations must adapt their strategies and develop new competencies as they progress through these stages.

Management’s task is to understand the root causes of the problems that a company will encounter as the business grows.

Start-up Stage

In this initial phase, companies focus on acquiring any customers they can find and generating revenue to survive. However, this short-term focus on sales volume can overshadow the need for developing long-term customer relationships and growth strategies. This oversight can plant the seeds for future challenges, potentially necessitating radical change later on.

Revenue Growth Stage

As sales revenue and profit margins begin to grow, companies often remain focused on sales revenue. This success can be seductive, leading management to overlook potential threats from competitors. Key areas that may be neglected include:

Customer segmentation strategies
Customer retention strategies
New distribution channels
Market analysis
Business infrastructure

Instead, the focus in this stage tends to be on production and pricing strategies to meet market demand.

However, the seeds of future problems are planted as other topics that will impact the organization’s future performance maybe neglected.

The Market Share Stage

As the business stabilizes and new competitors enter the market, companies face the dual challenge of retaining better clients while continuing to grow. Some companies may try to launch new products and enter new markets but they do so unsuccessfully as they have lost their competitive edge in the marketplace.

This stage is characterized by:

A changing competitive environment
Potential loss of competitive edge
Unsuccessful attempts to launch new products or enter new markets
Deteriorating profit margins due to increased competition

Companies that fail to adapt their sales strategies, analyze the competitive landscape, or respond to changing customer preferences may find themselves struggling in this stage. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that competitors often gain competitive advantage by entering the market with superior products or comparable products offered at lower prices. The result is often that profit margins deteriorate. Companies then react by downsizing the sales force to improve profit margins.

The Optimization Stage

Many organizations successfully move from the market share stage to the optimization stage of the growth cycle. Key characteristics of this stage include:

Recognizing that not all customers are equally profitable
Redeploying resources towards more valuable customers
Focusing on customer value and developing value-added solutions
Searching for sustainable growth opportunities

A key goal for companies at this stage is the search for customer value and the development of value-added solutions that apply to these selected customers as many similar competitive products exist. However, at this stage, companies must remain vigilant as value-added solutions can be imitated or improved upon by competitors, and the company may again face the challenges of the Market Share Stage.

Managerial Recommendations:

Develop a long-term strategic vision that extends beyond immediate sales goals.
Invest in market analysis and customer segmentation early on to build a strong foundation for future growth.
Continuously monitor the competitive landscape and be prepared to adapt strategies accordingly.
Focus on building and maintaining strong customer relationships throughout all stages of the business life cycle.
Invest in innovation to stay ahead of competitors and maintain a competitive edge.
Develop a culture of change management to ensure the organization can adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

Understanding the company’s life cycle and its implications for change is crucial for sustainable business growth.

Let’s discuss how these insights can be tailored to your specific business challenges and drive real results for your business. Reach out to me, I am offering a free 60-minute session.

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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The Growth Trajectory: Mastering Organizational Transformation

January 24, 2025

The Growth Trajectory: Mastering Organizational Transformation

TRANSFORMATION / by Inna Hüessmanns

24. January, 2025

The business life cycle is a crucial concept for understanding organizational growth and the challenges companies face at different stages.

Management’s task is to understand the root causes of the problems that a company will encounter as the business grows.

Start-up Stage

Revenue Growth Stage

Customer segmentation strategies
Customer retention strategies
New distribution channels
Market analysis
Business infrastructure

Instead, the focus in this stage tends to be on production and pricing strategies to meet market demand.

However, the seeds of future problems are planted as other topics that will impact the organization’s future performance maybe neglected.

The Market Share Stage

This stage is characterized by:

A changing competitive environment
Potential loss of competitive edge
Unsuccessful attempts to launch new products or enter new markets
Deteriorating profit margins due to increased competition

The Optimization Stage

Many organizations successfully move from the market share stage to the optimization stage of the growth cycle. Key characteristics of this stage include:

Recognizing that not all customers are equally profitable
Redeploying resources towards more valuable customers
Focusing on customer value and developing value-added solutions
Searching for sustainable growth opportunities

Managerial Recommendations:

Develop a long-term strategic vision that extends beyond immediate sales goals.
Invest in market analysis and customer segmentation early on to build a strong foundation for future growth.
Continuously monitor the competitive landscape and be prepared to adapt strategies accordingly.
Focus on building and maintaining strong customer relationships throughout all stages of the business life cycle.
Invest in innovation to stay ahead of competitors and maintain a competitive edge.
Develop a culture of change management to ensure the organization can adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

Understanding the company’s life cycle and its implications for change is crucial for sustainable business growth.

Let’s discuss how these insights can be tailored to your specific business challenges and drive real results for your business. Reach out to me, I am offering a free 60-minute session.

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

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Thriving in Compexity: A Sales Manager’s Guide

August 20, 2021

Thriving in Complexity: A Sales Manager's Guide to Navigating Blurred Boundaries

Sales Excellence / by Inna Hüessmanns

11. November, 2024

In today's dynamic business environment, sales managers find themselves at the epicenter of unprecedented change. The traditional sales paradigm is being reshaped by a perfect storm of rising customer expectations, technological advancements, and organizational transformations. To establish and maintain strong and long-lasting relationships with clients, sales managers must deal with a greater number and variety of stakeholders within client organizations. Understanding buyers’ influence dynamics and decision-making processes has become significantly more challenging. On the other side, their own organizations have also changed, going through digitalization, restructuring, process improvements, and cost cutting. Traditional boundaries between corporate functions such as sales, marketing, and other corporate functions have also blurred. In this new reality, success demands a fundamental reimagining of the sales manager's role – one that embraces adaptability, leverages cross-functional synergies, and thrives in the face of complexity.

Sales managers need to become social scientists capable of analyzing clients’ buying processes and influence across blurring boundaries in their own and in clients’ organizations in order to sell successfully in today’s business environment.

This article explores strategies for sales managers to effectively navigate these blurred lines and maximize their impact in the evolving sales landscape.

Embracing a Holistic Approach

As the lines between sales and marketing and other corporate functions blur, sales managers must adopt a more comprehensive perspective:

Develop cross-functional expertise: Expand your knowledge beyond sales aspects to include marketing strategies. Know all stakeholders of your selling center and their contribution to sales success.

Collaborate closely with marketing teams: Foster strong relationships with marketing colleagues to ensure alignment in messaging and customer approach.

Leverage marketing insights: Utilize market research, competitor analysis and customer insights provided by marketing to enhance your sales strategies and product positioning.

Collaborate closely with all stakeholders of your selling center: Regularly communicate customers’ expectations to all stakeholders of your selling center.

Adapting to Changing Customer Expectations

The need for customized solutions places additional burdens on sales managers in terms of information gathering and dissemination, communication and coordination within both buyer and seller organizations. To meet these expectations, sales managers must become adept at processing and managing increasing information loads while balancing multiple responsibilities.

Customer demands are evolving rapidly, requiring sales managers to:

Enhance customer knowledge continuously
Improve relationship management skills
Respond most effectively to customer inquiries
Broaden and deepen communication skills

Leverage Technology Effectively

Although the use of technology facilitates more rapid and frequent communication, it increases the demand on sales managers to provide information and services needed by customers in real time. Moreover, organizational adoption of CRM and sales force automation (SFA) systems requires sales managers to incorporate new technology and procedures into their already busy work routines without pausing from their primary selling responsibilities.

Technology plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between sales and marketing:

Embrace CRM and sales force automation (SFA) systems: Familiarize yourself with these tools to manage customer relationships and streamline sales processes.

Utilize data analytics: Leverage technology to analyze customer data and provide customized recommendations for long-term business solutions.

Enhance real-time communication: Use technological advancements to communicate effectively with both customers and internal teams.

Become a “Listening Post”

Sales managers are uniquely positioned to gather valuable market intelligence:

Actively monitor and anticipate market developments
Provide actionable insights to sales and marketing teams and other business functions
Continuously update market knowledge, including products and competitors
Leverage your sales forces’ full potential to provide actionable market intelligence
Develop and implement “voice of customer programs” within your organizations

By serving as a “listening post,” sales managers can help their organizations adapt more effectively to market turbulence and gain a competitive advantage.

Navigating Complex Buying Processes

Closely related to the issues of increased need for knowledge, communication, and coordination, noted above, is the need to provide individualized solutions for each customer.

As decision-making becomes more diffuse within client organizations, sales managers must:

Develop social science and strategic selling skills: Analyze power dynamics and influence across blurring organizational boundaries.

Understand strategic alliances: Recognize the complexities of partnerships where companies may be both collaborators and competitors.

Adapt to diverse stakeholders: Engage effectively with a greater number and variety of stakeholders within client organizations.

Conclusion

The blurring of boundaries between corporate functions presents both challenges and opportunities for sales managers. By embracing a holistic approach and developing new skills, sales managers can navigate this evolving landscape successfully. Those who adapt effectively will position themselves as invaluable assets in today’s dynamic business environment, bridging the gap between technical expertise and strategic business solutions. Buying and selling centers have existed for many years, and the notion of salespeople identifying key buying influences when selling to industrial accounts is not new. However, given the blurring of boundaries on both the selling and buying sides, more work needs to be done to advance knowledge in this area. Sales managers must continually update their knowledge of customers and competitors, exacerbating the seemingly ever-increasing cognitive load they must carry. In order for sales managers to meet the rapidly changing customer expectations, they must know more – faster. The best sales managers not only adapt quickly and effectively to external events, they also implement new customer strategies, innovate in the sales process, and seek constant performance improvements.

Managerial Recommendations:

Regular assessments of your sales organization and your selling center will help you understand the training needs of your salesforce and identify performance improvement gaps of your selling center.

The deployment of customized assessment tools and checklists will help you to cope with the rapidly changing business environment

For more information please contact:

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

E-Mail: ih@i-g-solutions.de

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THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF MARKET ORIENTATION ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

August 20, 2021

THE POSITIVE IMPACT OF MARKET ORIENTATION ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE

Market Intelligence / by Inna Hüessmanns

20. August, 2021

A market-oriented corporate culture and a proper generation, dissemination, and utilization of market intelligence are significant factors in achieving superior sales and business performance.

A growing body of empirical and academic research has analyzed the value of a market orientation for a wide variety of organizational issues, including new product success, customer satisfaction, sales performance, profitability, growth, and innovation. Market orientation has been found to have a positive impact on organizational performance.

Research on market orientation addressed how organizations adapt to their environments and develop competitive advantage and customer centricity. Market-oriented organizations are well positioned to anticipate the changing needs of customers and to respond to them through innovative products, solutions, and processes. Market orientation gives organizations an advantage in the speed and effectiveness of their response to opportunities and threats.

Market orientation supports the value of thorough market intelligence and the necessity of coordinated actions directed at gaining a sustainable competitive advantage.

Market orientation places the highest priority on creation and maintenance of superior customer value while considering the interests of other key stakeholders. It provides norms for behavior regarding the organizational development and responsiveness to market information.

Many organizations often fail to use the market knowledge available to them. Additionally, organizations increasingly have access to the same market information. Research indicates that market oriented organizations are expected to develop superior profitability.

Market Orientation is the ability of organizations to generate, disseminate, and utilize superior intelligence about their markets, customers, and competitors, and the coordinated application of cross-functional resources to the creation of superior customer value.

Key features of market oriented organizations is their expanded focus on market rather than customer intelligence, their emphasis on cross-functional coordination with respect to market intelligence, and their focus on activities related to market intelligence utilization.

Key Components of Market-Oriented Organizations

Three components of a market-oriented organization can be distinguished: customer orientation, competitor orientation, and inter-functional coordination.

Customer Orientation and Analysis

Customer orientation and customer centricity place the highest priority on continuously analysing customers’ needs and finding ways to provide superior customer value. Customer oriented organizations innovate throughout their entire business system, as opposed to solely in products or services.

Competitor Orientation and Analysis

Competitor orientation and analysis entail generating intelligence on the following and other questions and facilitate innovations: (1) What is the basis for your organization`s competitive advantage? (2) Who are your competitors? (3) Do they represent an attractive alternative from the perspective of your target customers? (4) What does your organization need to survive competition?

Cross-functional Coordination and Collaboration

Cross-functional coordination is one of the core components of market orientation. Academic research and empirical evidence indicate that coordinated dissemination of market intelligence among various functions was instrumental in the organization’s responsiveness to customer needs.

Market Intelligence as a Distinctive Capability

Market-oriented organizations have superior market intelligence capabilities, such as market sensing, customer analysis, and competitive intelligence. These capabilities deliver superior market insights that guide spanning capabilities. In contrast, the capabilities of internally oriented organizations are poorly guided by market considerations.

Effective market intelligence generation and dissemination, responsiveness to market intelligence, sales processes, and new product development processes are examples of capabilities that support a valuable market position and permit organizations to deliver superior value to customers in a cost-effective way.

Managing these processes so they cannot be readily matched by competitors is very different from managing vertical functions in a traditional hierarchical organization. Many internal boundaries must be crossed and relevant market intelligence should be readily available to all departments.

Market Intelligence helps achieving a better Sales Performance

Academic research proposes that greater collaboration between sales and marketing has benefits to the organization and improves business performance. Empirical evidence indicates that the reduction of interdepartmental conflict and effective market intelligence systems are important antecedents to effective collaboration between sales and marketing. Both sales and marketing have the goal of selling products and services. The two need to be integrated in order to build customer relationships and to boost revenue.

Market intelligence is a process upon which both sales and marketing should focus to achieve joint success, and it proposed to support collaboration. With the growth of competition in many markets, there is an urgent need to develop the collaboration of sales and marketing to improve business performance. Research indicates that gathering, analysis, and dissemination of market intelligence provides a method of improving organizational learning between sales and marketing.

Benefits of Market Intelligence for Sales and Marketing

Improving market intelligence is beneficial to both marketing and sales, and they should therefore be motivated to develop this area together. However, many organizations fail to develop systems to analyze customer and competitor intelligence. If marketing and sales do not cooperate, the company’s strategy will be inconsistent and execution will be flawed.

In many organizations, market information may be available, but organizational structures and processes fail to facilitate prompt and meaningful market information exchange. Market intelligence is important to all organizations, as it allows them to focus their activities on customers more efficiently.

The Impact of Market Intelligence on Innovation and Performance

A market-oriented culture facilitates organizational innovativeness, and this relationship appears even stronger in turbulent environmental settings. In turbulent environmental settings, organizations with superior market intelligence exhibit superior responsiveness, typically through organizational innovativeness, in dealing with the turbulences in the environment.

Being oriented toward markets provides a source of ideas for change and improvement.

Organizations with a greater capacity to innovate are able to develop a competitive advantage and achieve higher levels of business performance. A market- and learning oriented culture promotes innovation as part of an organization’s culture.

Inputs of market intelligence are essential to successful product and process innovation. They can be expected to have a positive impact on company competitiveness. At the same time, small firms are often unsuccessful as exporters because they depend entirely on incidental and personal market intelligence and fail to invest in systematic or representative methods for understanding new and different markets.

The Importance of Market Intelligence for Export-Oriented Organizations

Export intelligence generation includes all activities which constitute the creation of export market intelligence (e.g., export market research) and which are focused towards export customers, competitors, and the environmental changes in international markets. Export intelligence can be generated by international market research providers as well as organizational departments (e.g., marketing).

There is a strong evidence to show that export market intelligence can lead to superior performance in export markets. For organizations concerned with growing their business in international markets, distance to market is a challenge to be overcome.

For export-oriented organizations, distance to market implies risk, cost and ambiguity. The costs associated with overcoming distance are well known. The international expansion of organizations is constrained by the imposition of learning and coordination costs associated with overcoming geographic, cultural and psychic distance. Market-oriented organizations attempting to understand needs of international customers, measure customer satisfaction, target competitor’s weaknesses, and provide service in international markets will be handicapped to the extent that their customers and competitors speak different languages and conduct their business according to different rules of the game.

While exposure to international customers bring benefits in the form of access to new marketing ideas, the pursuit of multiple international markets inevitably raises the demands placed on managers for doing the things that lead to a market orientation. Organizations operating within large domestic markets will find it easier to generate market intelligence and cultivate market orientation than companies selling to customers scattered across international markets.

Market Intelligence helps to cope with Market Diversity.

In markets characterized by rapid change and low growth, market intelligence generation und utilization will have a greater impact on organization’s performance. Diversity of markets hampers attempts to cultivate a focused market orientation. The market intelligence performance link represents one of the most significant advances in recent marketing research. Three such sources of influence – distance to markets, dependence on international markets, and the diversity of markets served were found to have a significant and negative impact on the level of market orientation among organizations.

Outside Expertise for Market Intelligence Generation

Decision-making is becoming an increasingly complex process. And market intelligence generation becomes more important, since there are ever more unknowns coming into the decision-making process. This puts a great strain on market intelligence generating resources, a need to which organizations must be responsive.

Countless studies have shown that greater competitiveness is associated with the use of outside expertise and information in the form of management services, and information about markets, competitors, and customer needs.

How to Measure the Degree of Market Orientation?

The market orientation measure assesses the degree to which organizations engage in market intelligence generation activities, disseminate this intelligence vertically and horizontally, develop and implement marketing programs on the basis of the intelligence generated. One of the key attributes of this measure includes focus on customers and the forces that drive needs and preferences.

Managerial Recommendations:

To manage a company well is to manage its future; and to manage the future is to manage information. In proportion as the accuracy of forecasting and market intelligence is improved, in the same proportion will the survival and growth probabilities of the organization be enhanced. Good forecasting and market intelligence require vast amounts of the highest-quality data. The systematic generation and evaluation of such data will greatly improve the quality of forecasting and market data available to organizations.

In summary, a market-oriented corporate culture and a proper generation, dissemination, and utilization of market intelligence are significant factors in achieving superior sales and business performance. The most distinctive features of market-oriented organizations are their mastery of the market intelligence generating capabilities.

Regular and systematic market intelligence generation will help your organization to understand your customers’ needs, analyze your company’s performance against competition, understand your long-term growth opportunities in your domestic and international markets, and develop a high-performing organization.

We help you to understand your customers’ needs in your domestic and international markets, analyze your company’s performance against competition, understand your long-term growth opportunities, train your salesforce in market intelligence, and develop a market-oriented organization.

For market intelligence, market orientation and customer centricity program consulting and implementation enquiries please contact:

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

E-Mail: ih@i-g-solutions.de

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The Value of Market Intelligence for Business Success

November 11, 2020

The Value of Market Intelligence for Business Success

Market Intelligence / by Inna Hüessmanns

11. November, 2020

Moving to a market intelligence driven organization will give companies a better chance of outperforming competition.

Despite large investments in acquiring customer and market intelligence, many companies underutilize what they know. In some cases, information is held within some departments, often because of a lack of trust and the silo mentality.

Despite companies’ investments in digitalization and CRM technology, many of them still face declining customer satisfaction and sales revenues. Many organizations are now going through downsizing, restructuring, and cost cutting. Customers’ expectations and buying processes have changed dramatically in the last few years and they change faster than many companies can successfully respond to those changes. As a result, organizations need to cope with more information, rising customers’ expectations with regard to salesforce knowledge, and the faster speed of response.

Companies must continually maintain and update their market intelligence, that is customer intelligence, competitor analysis and industry insights.

However, too few industrial B2B organizations have market intelligence departments. Too often market research information does not find its way down to the sales departments or is not maintained. Surprisingly many companies do not have the full knowledge about their competitors, their customers, and even about their industries.

For organizations, to cope with the rapidly changing business environments and to be successful in the markets, they must know more and utilize real-time market data.

The more detailed knowledge of customers and markets the companies will have, the better they will be able to perform. Market intelligence involves not only an understanding of the customer but also identifying new and long-term business growth opportunities.

Many organizations believe that business growth is a matter of continued product research and improvement. The value of market intelligence for companies’ success is often not understood. The view that a business is a customer-satisfying organization, not a goods-producing organization, is vital for all businesses to understand.

A business success begins with a customer and his or her needs. Despite all the discussions about customer value, few industrial companies have actually done customer value research, which requires time, analytical and strategic thinking skills.

Today, companies face their toughest competition and a rapidly changing business environment ever.

Moving from a product focused organization to a market intelligence driven organization, however, will give companies a better chance of outperforming competition.

Sales declines for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that companies’ sales and growth strategies are not based on a thorough analysis of their customers, competitors and their industries.

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