A Go-to-Market strategy cannot be brought into reality and truly generate results without the Sales Governance reflecting priorities, realigning incentives, and adjusting to the commercial identity.

Sales processes within organizations often develop empirically and incrementally. Whilst this organic method of development is only natural at the outset when companies reach a certain size, it can lead to large discrepancies in the teams’ performance along with the market they act. It also results in difficulty to identify and leveraging the best practices across the sales teams and to grow the overall service level.

The symptoms or issues of a lack of harmonization in sales processes/governance often become apparent when companies experience the following:

1. Sales teams spending too much time with internal activities, rather than being “in the field”, conducting their core sell-out and analytical activities;
2. Difficulty in achieving a high-quality store execution due to an apparent lack of “field time”;
3. Lack of standardization between teams or divisions or different service levels delivered among different territories/zones;
4. Low visibility of actions that are being taken by the sales teams, with poor KPI tracking and misalignment of the key commercial focuses.

Overall, these problems characterize an inability to translate the Go-to-Market Strategy into execution. Without the correct sales rituals, processes, tools, and KPIs to sustain the strategy, sales performance inevitably suffers, and company growth can remain stunted.https://integrationconsulting.com/en/consulting-services/marketing-sales/go-to-market/

We help our clients translate their customers’ needs into practical governance rituals which deliver improved service levels.

The main goals of a Sales Governance project are to deliver a better service level to your customers and to reorganize and prioritize the focus of the sales teams based on those different customers’ needs.

In order to deliver these capabilities, we support our clients to:

1. Develop a clear governance model for the Sales area, providing alignment, rhythm, communication, and collaboration.
2. Define clear roles & responsibilities within the team hierarchy and across interactions for commercial and trade areas, as well as harmonize interactions with other areas (logistics, finance, etc).
3. Strengthen routines and checklists to create a “method” which allows for individuality as well as the adoption of the best practices of top performers, ensuring a culture of continuous improvement.
4. Embed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes and tools in the sales team routine.

Sales Governance projects benefit the company, sales teams, and the customer.

Our 6-step methodology ensures a true transformation, culminating in operational pilots to see the solution in action.

Across this journey, we aim to ensure a truly pragmatic and implementable solution considering the following ‘golden rules’, which we have learned across the years conducting these kinds of projects.

1. Be simple, pragmatic and concrete
   • Make sure the solutions brought are based on concrete experiences which have proven successful
   • Adjust the routines to the reality of the company (consider IT systems and their limitations/capabilities, the specific categories/product dynamics in the market)
2. Be connected to the company, strategy and the culture
   • Align the service level of each sales team to the GTM strategy
   • Guarantee the link between the sales governance design principles and the company’s culture
3. Be conscious of resistance to change
   • Leverage change management expertise, involve internal areas, and first generate a willingness to change and embed the mindset needed
   • Build up internal engagement, by monitoring best practices, success cases, and sharing them with the team