LITMIR.BIZ

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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 on capability building and molding the organization, given our disparate backgrounds. The sales operations team’s task is to set up clear foundations for how we work, how we use the data-mining tools that we have, how we provide and receive information, and how we manage it efficiently. In the future, we expect the team to be a flagship learning organization.

      How important is all the process alignment for growth as well as for effectiveness and efficiency?

      It’s extremely important. We make an enormous effort to understand where the best opportunities are for us, and we have extensive knowledge across our markets on which customers are more likely to win projects, where the next hotspots will be, etc. This information is critical. We need to move from this being an individual effort – such as someone working really hard in North America to understand which project we should focus on – to a collective effort. We will have more impact by looking at opportunities globally, and then we can allocate resources appropriately or find new opportunities ourselves.

      Chapter 2

      Mine Growth beneath the Surface

      We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

– T.S. Eliot

      The old cliché is that you can’t see the forest for the trees. In finding new sources of sales growth, the more relevant analogy is the reverse: by looking at the forest of average data, it’s easy to miss where growth truly lies. For example, it is widely known that US manufacturing is in a state of decline. In 2008 alone, manufacturing GDP fell by $44 billion. But if you disaggregate that number, you will find that there were healthy pockets of growth that amounted to almost $32 billion – four times India’s total growth that year.4 The hidden pockets of growth in your industry may lie in your own backyard.

      In the previous chapter, we showed how sales leaders can get ahead of competitors by capturing growth based on trends and investing ahead of demand. This chapter takes a look at sales executives who unearthed growth by undertaking micro-market analysis, identifying which markets have the highest growth potential, and aligning their resources to capture them.

      A global chemicals and services provider increased the growth rate of new accounts from 15 percent to 25 percent in just one year. The big breakthrough, a sales executive told us, was adopting a more granular view of the market. Instead of looking at current sales by region, as it had always done, the company developed a new and far more revealing view by examining share within customer industry sectors within specific US counties. This deeper

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