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Inflation. It’s something that we have become all too familiar with in recent years. As well as the strain it places on our own wallets, most organisations are experiencing rising internal costs whilst in parallel trying to serve their customer base which is also experiencing escalating cost pressures.

So, what can you do to help your sales team when product costs are increasing while your customers don’t have more money to spend?

The most obvious strategy might be to simply increase prices. However if this is done without demonstrating additional value for customers it can potentially damage relationships with established customers and cause even further damage to the top line.

And what do you do when you are under pressure to reduce the cost of your sales organisation while still being asked to grow the top line? Simply cutting sales heads may help address the problem but if not done thoughtfully it may also damage the top line further.

This may all sound like doom and gloom, but an environment such as this does still present opportunities to re-organise, improve efficiency, create stronger partnerships with customers, and most importantly drive the growth that your organisation is seeking. And if you do this right, leapfrog your competitors and steal market share.

Let’s look in greater detail on some strategies and tactics that may help you achieve that:

1. Analysing your end-to-end sales operations to understand the opportunities to fuel growth and optimise profits

· Fully review your sales based on territories, channel, customer segment and geographic dimensions.

· Assess the resource deployment of your sales team based on territories and channels, customer segments, and geographic dimensions.

· Review sales process and determine their effectiveness. This involves analysing deal win rates, sales effort by customer or product segment, and the effectiveness of your lead and pipeline management processes.

2. Use your analytics to determine the optimal promotional and pricing strategy

· Which products can you increase prices on?

· Which products can you drive more volume through while keeping price consistent?

· What product bundles can you promote?

· Where can you influence customers to change behaviours to reduce the overall cost to serve?

3. Strengthen your operational performance

In this highly competitive environment, look at where you can ‘beat the rest’ in terms of the quality of your delivery.

Look at the overall customer experience. How can you reduce friction for customers and reduce effort? How can you improve implementation and post-sales support?

By reinforcing your identity as a trusted and reliable partner, you can differentiate yourself from the rest and deflect the conversation away from simply being about price.

4. Ensure your customers are meeting their commercial commitments

Ensure that if you have entered into long term tenders or contracts with customers, that you have the discipline to ensure that customers are meeting those commitments.

5. Re-imagine product and service designs to offset rising costs

Companies that identify products or services that are most affected by inflation and direct their work force to re-design or substitute materials are often successful in tackling this threat to profit margins from inflationary pressures.

6. Create or improve your capabilities to monitor and analyse the effectiveness of your execution.

Businesses that have effective sales execution typically have tools and a data infrastructure that sets them up for success and provides them a high degree of transparency. This can help establish a culture of performance that is vital in whatever market conditions you are facing.

It is highly recommended that you have a sales operations capability to help you do this and you have systems and/or standard work that allows the insights from data to be readily available without ‘moving mountains’ to get it.

Conclusion

To conclude, organisations which develop a holistic data-driven approach to improving the top and bottom line, beyond simply cutting heads or broad-brush price increases, are often the most successful in waving the storm brought on by high inflationary pressures.

If you do this right, you can execute smarter and better, while cultivating and improving your relationships with your customers.