Staying relevant to your customers can be a long, arduous journey with many bumps and potholes in the road. Forward thinking companies are able to short circuit this journey by proactively reinventing / adapting their business models in order to stay ahead of competitors and remain indispensable to customers. In our two decades of work with hundreds of distributors, we’ve seen that successful reinvention can happen only when you, 1) streamline your business processes and link it to financial outcomes to create ‘Alignment’, 2) incorporate customer and supplier inputs to your processes to bring Relevance, and 3) focus on efficiently building your Capability to support your stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, etc.).

Companies need to focus on both ‘sales force effectiveness’ and ‘developing competitive value propositions’ together. They cannot be optimized in isolation. In order to do this companies should first discuss these questions. Which sales force activities provide the greatest return on time and dollars invested? Are sales force efforts directed toward activities that provide the most value to present and future customers?

Every company seeks profitable business growth. The challenge is how to sustain that growth over time. This next set of questions determines your path: How quickly can you grow? What are the key opportunities? What approach should you take? What are your growth objectives? Are you even ready to grow? How will customers respond to your efforts?