Symptom: (Internal) Sales (client liaison) staff are too busy with low-level clients to be proactive with key opinion-leading clients.
(Internal) Sales (client liaison) staff should be spending the majority of their time with clients, not with people within the organization.
Furthermore, they should be focusing their effort on those clients who are in the best position to help the organization succeed. This means selecting the "opinion leaders" within the client community, people whose recommendation will encourage many others to try the organization's products.
Since strategic opportunities can require a great deal of time, senior (internal) Sales (client liaison) staff must be reserved for opinion-leading clients (direct sales to major accounts). Nonetheless, the general client population requires business-driven advice. Therefore, a separate business-oriented group is required to perform Retail (internal) Sales. Its purpose is to lift the return on investment (ROI) throughout the client community.
If a Retail (internal) Sales is lacking, or if it exists but is not focused on facilitating opportunity-discovery and client contract brokerage, it should be properly chartered and its activities linked to the rest of the organization.
Root cause:Structure, organization chart, specifically a missing Retail (internal) Sales function copyright 2024 N. Dean Meyer and Associates Inc. All rights reserved.
