Companies which are confronted with rising costs often offer an inflated portfolio of products and services, many of which are neither profitable nor competitive. These organizations can be compared to a growing tree which develops an increasingly complex structure of twigs and branches. To make sure that the tree survives in the long term, it has to be pruned and reshaped regularly.
When reading the business press or talking to decision makers, you can get the impression that short-term profit maximization through cost cutting is a company´s primary goal. Of course, it is necessary to continuously optimize one´s cost position in the face of hyper competition. However, short-term cost cutting can be fatal in the medium and long term. The example of Deutsche Bahn shows what can happen when a company runs its equipment until it wears out and when it doesn´t invest sufficiently in personnel and infrastructure: Service quality will dramatically decline and the company will have problems serving its customers at all!
Realizing significant sales and turnover increases is a particular challenge in mature and stagnating markets. Still, most companies have ambitious growth objectives: They want to grow faster than the market and, ideally, achieve double-digit growth rates. What can the sales organization do to leverage additional sales and turnover potential in this situation?
Successful companies usually have ambitious growth goals. However, in many cases the performance of their current business is not strong enough to reach these goals. As a result, companies have to realize new growth potentials. To do so, we recommend a systematic approach.
Meanwhile, a number of approaches are available to solve the classical ´conflict´ between Marketing and Sales. However, there is much less focus on the cooperation of the two functions with their company´s service department. This is all the more astonishing as a growing number of successful companies actively market a range of services in addition to their physical products, thereby increasing turnover and profit.
