Sales departments
Supporting sales managers in their efforts to acquire new customers and create value for the company
Sales departments
Our Management Consulting teams support sales departments in the success of their projects. We address issues that concern companies, their customers and their employees.
Sales & Operations
Master the end-to-end customer process to align business strategy and operations, maximizing efficiency, customer satisfaction and sales results.
Implementation and improvement of the S&OP process
Having, on the one hand, a sales force whose objective is to generate sales and margins, and on the other, production teams who must produce products at a controlled cost, can sometimes cause major difficulties. However, this situation, which is common to all manufacturing companies, can lead to a number of difficulties for companies with poorly structured, siloed and ill-equipped processes:
- Inefficient management of sales forecasts;
- Inconsistent planning and a gap between production capacity and demand;
- Lack of communication between Sales and Production departments;
- Team frustration.
Our teams can help you:
- Diagnose the S&OP process, by identifying bottlenecks and recommending solutions to reduce them;
- Work on your data to identify which products to favor (to produce and sell), and which to limit;
- Benchmark market tools to industrialize or improve the S&OP process;
- Assist project managers in selecting and implementing solutions, as well as rolling them out across the organization
Help with tool selection and CPQ implementation (Configure, Price, Quote)
Automated offer definition and price management, based on offer characteristics, distribution channel, business model and corporate strategy, is an essential, if sometimes missing, building block in the sales process. The complexity of offers and products requires the implementation of offer configurator solutions, with the aim of :
- Enabling fast, efficient price updates, regardless of product complexity and pricing policy;
- Providing personalized offers and customized pricing for customers;
- Being integrated quickly and simply into the corporate ecosystem – particularly with ERP and CRM.
Our teams can support you :
- Upstream, in defining or formalizing your pricing processes for products and services;
- In the search for a technological solution to implement the pricing process;
- Assisting project managers in selecting and implementing solutions, as well as rolling them out across the organization.
Help with tool selection and CRM implementation
Over the past 15 years, competition in the CRM sector has been intense, with pure players becoming leaders and software giants becoming ever more competitive. However, choosing the right tool for your business model and corporate strategy is more complicated than it seems. The company will need to answer a number of questions before implementing the right solution:
- What are the expected benefits of replacing or implementing a CRM tool, in the context of the company and its business model?
- What are the organizational impacts that managers will have to deal with?
- How does the chosen solution fit into the company’s application landscape?
Our expertise lies in supporting you throughout this process, bringing our experience of transformation projects and our sectoral expertise in various fields.
Our teams support you :
- Upstream, in defining or formalizing your sales processes for products and services;
- In the search for technological solutions that are consistent with your business and compatible with your company’s IT strategy; In the search for technological solutions that are consistent with your business and compatible with your company’s IT strategy;
- In assisting project managers in selecting and implementing solutions, and in rolling them out across the organization.
360° view and customer journey
Improve your company’s vision and customer journey to enhance your sales performance
Personalization and customer experience
Personalizing the customer experience is essential in modern commerce. Studies show that 88% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that offer personalized BtoC and BtoB* offers.
Using customer data, advanced technologies and segmentation strategies, brands can offer unique interactions that strengthen customer knowledge, loyalty and drive sales growth, including :
- Identifying friction points in the customer journey by process (sales, complaints, after-sales service, etc.) and implementing improvement plans;
- Using customer data to personalize the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey;
- Choosing digital tools (customer data platform, customer portal, mobile application, IVR, etc.) that are consistent with the company’s sales strategy.
Our teams support you :
- Upstream, in identifying irritants in your processes, whether through process mapping or data analysis;
- On the search for business solutions, BI expertise and technological solutions to eliminate these irritants, or create new processes;
- Assisting project managers in choosing and implementing solutions, as well as rolling them out across the organization.
* Salesforce study – Focus on customer service 5th edition – 2022
Data collection and 360° views
The 360° view of the customer, the “holy grail” of sales departments, provides a complete view of the customer, thanks to the information collected by the company on all the interactions the customer has with the company. While the intention to unify all customer information remains complex and costly for many industries, implementation generally requires :
- Defining effective, cross-functional data governance;
- Defining the relevant customer data that the company wishes to aggregate to build the indicators needed to steer the organization;
- Integrating data from various sources, such as ERP, social networks, web and mobile applications, and even external information, in addition to traditional CRM data;
- Efficiently displaying metrics in a way that is tailored to the company’s various functions.
Our team can help you define your data governance and business intelligence projects, from the initial phase of tool selection through to support and implementation.
Sales administration
Focus your sales department on value-added tasks to boost customer satisfaction, keep costs down and retain staff.
Improve the operational excellence of your sales administration
Customer service departments, whether sales forces or sales administration, are the link between the customer and the company. It’s common for them to focus on low-value administrative tasks, such as shipping support, appropriating technological tools, updating offers and prices, and so on. This focus is often to the detriment of higher-value activities such as customer and file knowledge, follow-up and sales pressure, management of customer priorities, product knowledge, monitoring of sales in progress, and so on.
Sales departments need to evolve their operating models in order to become more responsive by :
- Automating repetitive, low-value processes;
- Improving customer service management processes with the introduction of premium or self-care services;
- Capturing sales process triggers (orders, information requests, complaints, after-sales returns, etc.) as early as possible in a digital channel (self-service or e-commerce, digital data exchange, ticket or email, telephone call transcription, etc.);
- Reducing time- and resource-consuming obstacles to core processes;
Decompartmentalizing information sharing between related departments.
Our teams can support you in your sales administration transformation projects:
- By drawing up business cases enabling decision-making on changes in organization and tools;
- By working on the redesign of new business models for teams involved in customer service, but also for related teams linked to the sales process;
- Assisting project management in the choice and implementation of solutions, as well as their deployment within the organization.
Improve your customer service by strengthening your omnichannel strategy
Whether for BtoC or BtoB, whether for multinationals, SMEs or public administrations, omnichannelity has become a major challenge in customer relations. Indeed, the customer journey evolves through several contact points and different channels during all stages of the prospect’s or customer’s life cycle.
Indeed, the benefits of such an implementation are relatively obvious: increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, higher sales and revenue, reductions in customer service inefficiencies, etc.
If it’s easier to implement for an initial subscription or first purchase, omnichannelity can quickly become a headache to implement for more complex business cases. The classic irritants we encounter on this type of mission are :
- The multiplicity of company channels, often siloed, resulting in a fragmented customer experience and a high “cost to serve” for the customer;
- Customer data that can be lost from one channel to another, and sometimes not used by the company;
- Desynchronization between different channels, which can have an impact on sales administration and related departments;
- An application ecosystem ill-suited to the business or poorly mastered by employees.
Our teams support you in your projects:
- Diagnosis of existing organization and tools for serving customers and achieving high levels of customer satisfaction;
- Studies of the technical and economic opportunities for moving to an omnichannel organization, or for improving the existing organization;
- Project management assistance for the selection and implementation of solutions, as well as their deployment within the organization.
