What is your view on “Changing Sales Strategies”? Where do you see sales in 2020?

Sales Strategy, like IT Strategy or Marketing Strategy, is subservient to the overall Organisation Strategy.. Simply put , Sales Strategy is nothing but a translation of an Organisation or a Business Strategy at the level of a customer. A good Sales Strategy must be able to answer the following key questions :

• Who is my customer ? Who should we target ? Why ?
• What is my value proposition to my Target customer/s?
• How should I address each segment? What are their needs/problems?
• What is their buying behaviour? What are they looking for?
• How do we differentiate our offering ?
• How do we go about executing our strategy? What channels? What processes? What methodology? What Sales pitch?
• How should I design my Sales Organisation ? What KPIs should we chase? How do we recognise and reward our people?

Since organisations evolve, their business models evolve, Sales strategy and processes also need to evolve with changing times. I believe that we are at an inflection point and organisations will be forced to sharpen their Sales Strategy and take calculated bets about the future. In addition to building capabilities, partnering / competing with new age companies will have implications on the Route to Market . Organisations will have to rethink their talent pipeline in terms of the shift from purely execution to strategy and execution besides capability to manage an ecosystem of partnerships.

What are the top 3 sales strategies every sales leader should be adopting?

Each Organisation has to chart its own course as far as Organisation Strategy and Sales Strategy are concerned. Therefore it would not be prudent to spell out three strategies as some kind of Gospel truth for each company. However, organisations need to keep in mind a set of locked-in trends , as far as India is concerned. These according to me are :

• Evolution and Organisation of Channel.
• Emergence of potential partners for Eco-system management
• Growth projections of Tier 1 and Tier 2 Cities
• Technology as an enabler
• Growth of e-commerce and hyperlocal.
• Talent Models

What is the impact of technology on sales processes? Your thoughts on this?

Technology has started redefining the business processes like never before.. Technology is both a driver and an enabler of disruptive shifts. Sales Organisations that will embrace technology are more likely to succeed than those that do not. Organisations in India are exploring technology in host of processes . Some key areas are

• Robotic process automation
• Chat bots
• Virtual and Augmented Reality
• Advance analytics, including Artificial intelligence and Machine learning, having implications across processes, e.g., Dynamic routing, Suggestive and predictive ordering, n=1 consumer and customer planning, etc.

What are the most common challenges sales leaders are facing today?

These are challenging times and definitely call for organisations being nimble footed. Some of the key challenges , according to me are :

• Balancing short-term results with long/ mid term capability building
• Quick adoption and assimilation of new technology and processes
• Rethinking the current roles and Change in structure
• Adoption of Agile way of working
• Implications of digitization on workforce planning

Your views on The Economic Times “Sales Strategy Summit” and how important do you to feel is the need of organizing such summits?

This is a much needed event and will benefit organisations immensely. This forum will provide a platform for sharing of best practices and strategy.

Many a times, the difference between high performance and mediocre one is not strategy, but execution. This summit provides an opportunity for middle managers to understand the rationale behind the strategy and therefore help in aligning execution with Strategy.

Sanjay Wali

Senior VP Sales – Godfrey Philips

For more information about the Sales Strategy Summit, please visit: http://et-edge.com/conferences/salesstrategy/