style="font-size:15px;"> In the next chapter, we’ll see how top sales managers don’t just take a macroview of opportunities; they’re also able to turn the microscope onto their existing markets to find the untapped pockets of growth.
Interview: William J. Teuber, Jr., EMC
Vice-Chairman
How do you anticipate megatrends such as cloud computing?
We use a multipronged approach. We follow our cutting-edge customers closely to see what they are doing. We listen to our engineers – our innovation engine – to hear where they want to drive things. We have a sophisticated business-development team that monitors new company formation carefully. We work with research universities to discover which emerging technologies have potential commercial applications. Then we marry all that thinking with what our customers are thinking. Trends don’t appear clearly from any one source. They come into focus when you bring a mixture of perspectives together.
How has your go-to-market model scaled up with your dramatic growth?
It has scaled with our opportunity. We have learned to focus where our opportunity exists, both with current customers and outside our base. We identify opportunities by region and by customer, and we get very granular with irrefutable data to see where we can move the needle. Having that discipline gives us the ability to devise a plan to capture dramatic growth through our direct sales force as well as through channel partners.
How do you reconcile the quarterly heartbeat of your sales organization with the need to invest ahead of demand to capture long-term opportunities?
In a publicly traded company with a public report card every 90 days, you have to do both. In our international operations, we introduced a three-year sales planning process to get beyond the 90-day mentality of “How will I make my number this quarter?” We monitor how markets are going to develop and prioritize opportunities that will generate the best growth over the next four to eight quarters. We’ve also created a Rapid Growth Markets Board made up of senior leaders who hold meetings in those markets and link back to the rest of the company, so people in product development can plan accordingly.
You have almost doubled revenues in the past five years and are planning to grow faster than your markets. How do you sustain such growth?
You have to have the right strategy and the right offering, and your sales organization has to communicate the benefits of that to the customer. In order to build our portfolio and market reach, we’ve bought 35 companies over the last five years. Doing cross-company sales integration successfully is one of the hardest things to do. We’ve learned a lot from experience.
Ultimately, you have to have the best people to execute your strategy. I’m betting my job on everyone who works for me. Therefore, I’m going to select the top people to represent our company in the marketplace. EMC has what I consider to be the gold standard of sales forces. There is an aura about it. To be in sales at EMC is a badge of honor. That’s why we attract and retain the right people – to make sure we have the best talent bench in our sales force.
Interview: Karim Amin, Siemens
CEO Global Sales, Power & Gas
How do you balance the quarterly heartbeat of sales with a longer-term vision?
I head a global sales organization for power generation that was formed recently from a fragmented business unit and a country-specific organization. We have undergone a lot of changes since this consolidation, and moving to a longer-term mind-set is an ongoing process.
A quarterly perspective can be an organization’s Achilles’ heel because you can miss the chance to adapt and make the decisions that will deliver success three or four years down the line. My role is therefore geared toward anticipating trends and constantly adapting the organization to make it fit the ever-changing and complex landscape. Of course I also spend time on quarterly figures, but I have the privilege of seeing the bigger picture. I don’t have to take just a country, regional, specific product or business-line view.
Seventy percent of my time is spent understanding why we are winning, why we are losing, and which customers are changing their buying behavior and why. This requires diagnostic tools – CRM systems – that are capable of correlating data points and building dashboards that help visualize them. Then, of course, I feed all this information back into the wider organization. This helps inform new products, R&D investment, new business models, etc.
How do your sales operations support you since the consolidation?
We’re investing a lot in our sales operations to better inform and support our sales strategy. They’re able to do this by collating all the data from the market and running diagnostics using CRM tools to help reduce complexity and provide an overview of what is happening in the market. We see, for example, the impact of shifts in technology in the power-generation market. Customers are demanding more from OEMs than just big, efficient equipment.
The sales operations are supported by two pillars: the CRM system and the skills of the core team, which brings the human factor to the diagnostics. From their output, we are able to adapt not just the sales organization but also the entire value chain. They’ve helped clarify where we stand in terms of supply-chain efficiency or time to market, for example. In complex organizations such as Siemens, this is extremely beneficial.
The new organization is definitely helping to define the market trends more effectively and faster. We have broken down some silos. For example, all our data from 32 different countries and five different business units came in discrete “boxes.” You would need to open 50 to 60 boxes just to understand what was happening, let alone what the business could look like in the future. Today, with the integrated sales force, we need to open only ten boxes to get that information.
How do you help your team implement the new approach?
Change is always tough, especially in an organization that stretches across so many countries and different disciplines. It all starts from a very clear message around why we need to change. When people really believe that change is necessary, and the reasons behind it are crystal clear, then implementation becomes a matter of how fast you do it and how smoothly. In our case, we spent almost a year getting the message across to more than 2,000 employees – not just about the new way we were structured but about the way we were thinking and the way we should be approaching customers, markets, and opportunities.
We worked both bottom up and top down. Top down, we had a group putting in place very concrete KPIs to measure progress. It was a very structured approach. We agreed on the top five or six things we needed to focus on in the first hundred days, the second hundred, and the third hundred. The bottom-up part involved putting change agents in every corner of the organization. We had 60 to 70 of them, and we made it very clear to them that they were playing an important role in the future of the organization. They were part of our staff strategy meetings, and they received a lot of information about the why and the how of our change.
Success will come from changing people’s mind-sets, and that’s very difficult to measure. You have to see them in pressure situations to see whether they stick with the new way of doing things or revert back to their old behavior.
How do you tune your sales operating model for future growth?
The sales operations team is definitely the glue that keeps everything in sync and that gives guidance for the future. In these early stages, we are setting up the architecture and the infrastructure to improve processes. We need to work
