The Latin American economy has seen better days.
Over the past few years, Latin American countries have experienced
slowdowns in both GDP and private-consumption growth, a rise in
inflation rates, and devaluations in currency. In this difficult
environment, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers must make
careful choices and deliberately weigh trade-offs.
How are the region’s leading CPG companies managing their customers
and channels? Our survey of 35 companies offers some best practices. We
examine what “winners” do differently from their peers—winners being
companies that achieved higher sales growth than the categories they
play in while also outperforming peers on one or more customer- or
channel-management metrics.
The survey results show that by applying
best practices, companies can grow sales by more than seven percentage
points ahead of others, while reducing selling expenses as a percent of
net sales (Exhibit 1). This difference in performance between winners
and others is bigger than in any other market we studied except China,
where the gap is 17 percentage points.1
Read rest of article here.
Tuesday, 21 June 2016
Thursday, 16 June 2016
Playing catch-up: How to partner with the retailer of the future
There’s no denying that the balance of power in the
consumer industry has tilted. Retailers have the advantage over
consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) manufacturers—and retail buyers are deftly
using their leverage at the negotiating table. Retail buyers are more
sophisticated, more analytical, and more demanding than ever. Consider
this: each of the top ten US retailers employs dozens of big data
professionals who provide buyers with valuable insights. The same
retailers have also hired more than 70 executives from European retail
companies, known for having more aggressive negotiation styles than
their American counterparts. In this increasingly adversarial
environment, what’s a CPG key-account manager to do?
These changes in the retailer-manufacturer dynamic are the result of three trends that have been playing out in the US consumer industry: the steady rise of newer retail channels including hard discount and e-commerce, stagnant growth among the largest CPG brands, and burgeoning capabilities in big data and advanced analytics. The trends have been evident for a few years, yet in our experience the majority of CPG sales leaders are still largely doing things the way they always have. They continue to use the same key-account management (KAM) model and they haven’t enhanced key-account managers’ skill sets to keep up with the increasingly competitive business environment.
The future success of CPG sales teams rests on how aggressively sales leaders move to overhaul their KAM model and upgrade their sales capabilities. In this article, we discuss the most important changes that CPG companies will need to make. Companies that have implemented these changes have driven incremental growth of up to 3 percent above the category, while also reducing sales expenses.
Read rest of article here.
These changes in the retailer-manufacturer dynamic are the result of three trends that have been playing out in the US consumer industry: the steady rise of newer retail channels including hard discount and e-commerce, stagnant growth among the largest CPG brands, and burgeoning capabilities in big data and advanced analytics. The trends have been evident for a few years, yet in our experience the majority of CPG sales leaders are still largely doing things the way they always have. They continue to use the same key-account management (KAM) model and they haven’t enhanced key-account managers’ skill sets to keep up with the increasingly competitive business environment.
The future success of CPG sales teams rests on how aggressively sales leaders move to overhaul their KAM model and upgrade their sales capabilities. In this article, we discuss the most important changes that CPG companies will need to make. Companies that have implemented these changes have driven incremental growth of up to 3 percent above the category, while also reducing sales expenses.
Read rest of article here.
Tuesday, 14 June 2016
Jack Ma speaks about the value of customers ...
Jack
Ma once said, 'When Selling to close friends and family, no matter how
much you're selling to them, they will always feel you're earning their
money, no matter how cheap you sell to them, they still wouldn't
appreciate it.'
There will always be people who do not care about your Costs, Time, Effort, they rather let other people cheat them, allowing others to earn, then supporting someone they know. Cause in their heart, they will always be thinking, 'How much did he earn from me?' instead of "How much did he SAVE/MAKE for me?"
This is a classic example of a poor person's mentality!
How did the rich people become rich? One of the main reason is because they are willing to SUPPORT their associates business, taking care of one another's interests thus naturally they get back more.
Your Friends will in turn support you, thus the circle of wealth continues to grow and grow!
Simple Logic, you will start to get rich once you understand it.
Jack Ma on Sales: 'When doing Sales, the first people who will trust you will be Strangers, Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you. Family will look down upon you.'
The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together dinner, entertainment, you will realised: Everyone else is present except the Strangers.
Do you get the meaning of this?
We need to treat our dear Strangers better! And even more so to Friends who know what you are doing and yet still SUPPORT you!
Let us treat STRANGERS who buys from us better from today. They are your BEST customers!
There will always be people who do not care about your Costs, Time, Effort, they rather let other people cheat them, allowing others to earn, then supporting someone they know. Cause in their heart, they will always be thinking, 'How much did he earn from me?' instead of "How much did he SAVE/MAKE for me?"
This is a classic example of a poor person's mentality!
How did the rich people become rich? One of the main reason is because they are willing to SUPPORT their associates business, taking care of one another's interests thus naturally they get back more.
Your Friends will in turn support you, thus the circle of wealth continues to grow and grow!
Simple Logic, you will start to get rich once you understand it.
Jack Ma on Sales: 'When doing Sales, the first people who will trust you will be Strangers, Friends will be shielding against you, fair-weather friends will distance from you. Family will look down upon you.'
The day you finally succeed, paying the bill for every get-together dinner, entertainment, you will realised: Everyone else is present except the Strangers.
Do you get the meaning of this?
We need to treat our dear Strangers better! And even more so to Friends who know what you are doing and yet still SUPPORT you!
Let us treat STRANGERS who buys from us better from today. They are your BEST customers!
Tuesday, 31 May 2016
The Greatest Barriers to Growth, According to Executives
A large,
iconic multinational is now struggling to keep growing while being
chased by leaner, more aggressive competitors. To find the next wave of
growth, they were taking a hard look at their bureaucracy.
“When I joined the company, the front line management jobs were the best,” the CEO told us. He had started his career in one of those jobs, as a country manager, and worked his way up. “It was like running a small business with only a few targets on performance and obeying the rules.” Today, he confessed, “it is the worst job.”
It takes more than 10 approvals for front line managers to get a green light for any investment, and many have tacked to the wall a whole sheet of targets, requirements, weekly and monthly templates to fill out and submit to different corporate offices.
No surprise, the data reflected this struggle: Employee loyalty at the front line was the lowest in the company. The key product and customer jobs no longer attracted the best talent. Headcount in the corporate office had grown at more than twice the rate of the rest of the company over the past decade, and people with the least contact with the front line were making a larger share of the decisions than ever before. After seeing this data presented, the CEO left the meeting committed to reversing course.
It’s a common story in business today. Eighty-five percent of executives say that the greatest barriers to achieving their growth objectives lie inside their own four walls, according to research by Bain & Company. In the largest companies, this rises to 94 percent of executives who believe that their most difficult challenges are internal, not external.
Our analysis showed something else, too: Most of these barriers resulted from complexity and bureaucracy that had accumulated as these leaders scaled up their businesses. The pattern holds true for some of the most studied cases of sudden business declines, like Nokia losing out to Apple or Sony getting out maneuvered in video cameras by GoPro. The stall-outs point more to a loss of internal metabolism, speed, self-awareness, sense of urgency, and general bloat of staff rather than any outside factors they may have missed.
We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth. But what can you do about it?
A first step is to understand the five ways that bureaucracy distorts behavior in your company. You can think of these distortions as a set of lenses to focus your attack on this chronic disease of maturing companies.
Distortion of speed: Young, founder-led companies often set the speed in their competitive arenas—speed to recognize the need to change, interpret how, decide on what, and react. Young insurgents whose speed allows them to get “inside” of the decision cycle of a large, slow incumbent competitor can reap an enormous advantage. Think of how fast Netflix is adding new programming and changing the game of television versus traditional networks. Speed is measurable and can be benchmarked. But as companies grow, they become sclerotic, like the company described by the CEO at the start of this article.
One simple way to maintain speed as your company grows is by having fewer, higher impact meetings. An example is the Monday Meeting used by L Brands, the company run by Les Wexner, cited by HBR last year as the CEO with the best unadjusted financial performance in the world. L Brands companies, like Victoria’s Secret, have Monday meetings with all of the most influential management members present (or on the phone) to review the major initiatives and to ferret out blockages to progress. A Tuesday follow-up call is used to see whether the blockages are being removed. One senior manager told us: “You never miss it. It is the most disciplined thing we do. It has morphed to ‘we can’t live without it.’”
Distortion of motive: Young organizations have no place to hide and the founder knows everything. Meritocracy can flourish when things are transparent. Yet, as companies grow, promotions fall in line with corporate processes, complex “balanced” scorecards of performance, and regression to the mean. Companies that have lost meritocracy often turn into political organizations where how you look and sound can trump what you actually do.
Yet, the loss of meritocracy is not inevitable as companies grow. One of the best organizations at maintaining meritocracy and the “owner’s mentality” is AB InBev, the world’s largest beer company. “There is no delegation and little tolerance for excuses,” Jo Van Biesbroeck, former head of strategy and one of AB InBev’s longest-serving employees, told us recently. “You either perform or not; you are paid for solutions, not effort.” Simple targets, no places to hide, and simple communication is where it starts.
Distortion of time: Our colleague Michael Mankins recently calculated the cost of an executive committee meeting
at one large company: preparation across departments for the
meeting—backup books, power point presentations, pre-meetings,
rehearsals—added up to 300,000 hours. This is probably more hours than
some start-ups expend in a year to manage their entire firm.
Several practices can help prevent the take-over of executive agendas by the tyranny of the corporate calendar, including the imposition of rules on meeting length, number of attendees, or composition (no large meetings without the decision-maker present). However, it starts with self-awareness. Management teams should study how they use their time as carefully as how they use their money, starting with three questions: How much time do they spend with top customers? How much time do they spend with high potential employees? How much time do they spend on solving the firm’s top five challenges? Teams that ask themselves these questions honestly will quickly see the first step to take.
Distortion of decisions: A number of years ago we studied in detail how the most important decisions like product approvals were made at a large pharmaceutical firm. The results shocked the management team, revealing that nearly seven in ten decisions involved a process that the participants could not describe with a wide range of views on who the decision maker was.
Start your assault on the decision distortions of bureaucracy with your five or ten most important types of decisions. Map out how they are really made and how many people are involved. Then attack what will emerge clearly as obvious root causes of distortion: decisions that should be pushed to the front line with a few vital guiding principles; decisions that should have many fewer people involved; and decisions where it’s unclear who actually decides. This approach can re-empower the front line and renew the owner’s mindset at large companies.
Distortion of information: In a company’s early years, the founding team knows the customers by name and the products in detail. Intimacy and ground level knowledge are second nature. Yet, as companies grow this becomes increasingly difficult. Customer names give way first to customer group averages and then to summaries of research interpreted and re-interpreted as it flows up through layers to the desks of the senior team, sometimes diminishing the role of insurgent, smaller competitors or of customers who are the “canaries in the coal mine” of market challenge.
Haier, one of the world’s leading appliance companies, has built its organization around the goal of its founder Zhang Ruimin to reduce the distance between the CEO and the front line. The underlying principle is to push as many decisions as possible down to the place where the ground-level information exists—in this case, down to a network of semi-autonomous teams.
But there are other, simpler ways to renew this aspect of a founder’s mentality and its connection to the front line. We have seen management teams benefit greatly from setting up ways for them to “drop in” on customer calls, or call-center service discussions. Some teams have insisted that every discussion of the marketplace begin with actual named customers. Others have set up fast feedback surveys of front line employees (in Bain’s case, we survey every project team every two weeks, down to the most junior analyst, and make the data available), with the requirement that all issues be discussed within a week.
Vague attacks on bureaucracy are not precise enough to renew a company efficiently. You must disable the specific root causes and measure the impact on these five outcomes. It is not enough to address organizational layers and managers, because the most lasting results come from reversing the deep distortions of bureaucracy to rekindle a founder’s mentality.
“When I joined the company, the front line management jobs were the best,” the CEO told us. He had started his career in one of those jobs, as a country manager, and worked his way up. “It was like running a small business with only a few targets on performance and obeying the rules.” Today, he confessed, “it is the worst job.”
It takes more than 10 approvals for front line managers to get a green light for any investment, and many have tacked to the wall a whole sheet of targets, requirements, weekly and monthly templates to fill out and submit to different corporate offices.
No surprise, the data reflected this struggle: Employee loyalty at the front line was the lowest in the company. The key product and customer jobs no longer attracted the best talent. Headcount in the corporate office had grown at more than twice the rate of the rest of the company over the past decade, and people with the least contact with the front line were making a larger share of the decisions than ever before. After seeing this data presented, the CEO left the meeting committed to reversing course.
It’s a common story in business today. Eighty-five percent of executives say that the greatest barriers to achieving their growth objectives lie inside their own four walls, according to research by Bain & Company. In the largest companies, this rises to 94 percent of executives who believe that their most difficult challenges are internal, not external.
Our analysis showed something else, too: Most of these barriers resulted from complexity and bureaucracy that had accumulated as these leaders scaled up their businesses. The pattern holds true for some of the most studied cases of sudden business declines, like Nokia losing out to Apple or Sony getting out maneuvered in video cameras by GoPro. The stall-outs point more to a loss of internal metabolism, speed, self-awareness, sense of urgency, and general bloat of staff rather than any outside factors they may have missed.
We call this dynamic the “Growth Paradox:” Growth creates complexity and yet complexity is the number one killer of profitable growth. You cannot win on the outside, in the marketplace, if you are losing on the inside, with an organization stifled by its own growth. But what can you do about it?
A first step is to understand the five ways that bureaucracy distorts behavior in your company. You can think of these distortions as a set of lenses to focus your attack on this chronic disease of maturing companies.
Distortion of speed: Young, founder-led companies often set the speed in their competitive arenas—speed to recognize the need to change, interpret how, decide on what, and react. Young insurgents whose speed allows them to get “inside” of the decision cycle of a large, slow incumbent competitor can reap an enormous advantage. Think of how fast Netflix is adding new programming and changing the game of television versus traditional networks. Speed is measurable and can be benchmarked. But as companies grow, they become sclerotic, like the company described by the CEO at the start of this article.
One simple way to maintain speed as your company grows is by having fewer, higher impact meetings. An example is the Monday Meeting used by L Brands, the company run by Les Wexner, cited by HBR last year as the CEO with the best unadjusted financial performance in the world. L Brands companies, like Victoria’s Secret, have Monday meetings with all of the most influential management members present (or on the phone) to review the major initiatives and to ferret out blockages to progress. A Tuesday follow-up call is used to see whether the blockages are being removed. One senior manager told us: “You never miss it. It is the most disciplined thing we do. It has morphed to ‘we can’t live without it.’”
Distortion of motive: Young organizations have no place to hide and the founder knows everything. Meritocracy can flourish when things are transparent. Yet, as companies grow, promotions fall in line with corporate processes, complex “balanced” scorecards of performance, and regression to the mean. Companies that have lost meritocracy often turn into political organizations where how you look and sound can trump what you actually do.
Yet, the loss of meritocracy is not inevitable as companies grow. One of the best organizations at maintaining meritocracy and the “owner’s mentality” is AB InBev, the world’s largest beer company. “There is no delegation and little tolerance for excuses,” Jo Van Biesbroeck, former head of strategy and one of AB InBev’s longest-serving employees, told us recently. “You either perform or not; you are paid for solutions, not effort.” Simple targets, no places to hide, and simple communication is where it starts.
Several practices can help prevent the take-over of executive agendas by the tyranny of the corporate calendar, including the imposition of rules on meeting length, number of attendees, or composition (no large meetings without the decision-maker present). However, it starts with self-awareness. Management teams should study how they use their time as carefully as how they use their money, starting with three questions: How much time do they spend with top customers? How much time do they spend with high potential employees? How much time do they spend on solving the firm’s top five challenges? Teams that ask themselves these questions honestly will quickly see the first step to take.
Distortion of decisions: A number of years ago we studied in detail how the most important decisions like product approvals were made at a large pharmaceutical firm. The results shocked the management team, revealing that nearly seven in ten decisions involved a process that the participants could not describe with a wide range of views on who the decision maker was.
Start your assault on the decision distortions of bureaucracy with your five or ten most important types of decisions. Map out how they are really made and how many people are involved. Then attack what will emerge clearly as obvious root causes of distortion: decisions that should be pushed to the front line with a few vital guiding principles; decisions that should have many fewer people involved; and decisions where it’s unclear who actually decides. This approach can re-empower the front line and renew the owner’s mindset at large companies.
Distortion of information: In a company’s early years, the founding team knows the customers by name and the products in detail. Intimacy and ground level knowledge are second nature. Yet, as companies grow this becomes increasingly difficult. Customer names give way first to customer group averages and then to summaries of research interpreted and re-interpreted as it flows up through layers to the desks of the senior team, sometimes diminishing the role of insurgent, smaller competitors or of customers who are the “canaries in the coal mine” of market challenge.
Haier, one of the world’s leading appliance companies, has built its organization around the goal of its founder Zhang Ruimin to reduce the distance between the CEO and the front line. The underlying principle is to push as many decisions as possible down to the place where the ground-level information exists—in this case, down to a network of semi-autonomous teams.
But there are other, simpler ways to renew this aspect of a founder’s mentality and its connection to the front line. We have seen management teams benefit greatly from setting up ways for them to “drop in” on customer calls, or call-center service discussions. Some teams have insisted that every discussion of the marketplace begin with actual named customers. Others have set up fast feedback surveys of front line employees (in Bain’s case, we survey every project team every two weeks, down to the most junior analyst, and make the data available), with the requirement that all issues be discussed within a week.
Vague attacks on bureaucracy are not precise enough to renew a company efficiently. You must disable the specific root causes and measure the impact on these five outcomes. It is not enough to address organizational layers and managers, because the most lasting results come from reversing the deep distortions of bureaucracy to rekindle a founder’s mentality.
Monday, 30 May 2016
The Sales Secrets of High Growth Companies
1. Commitment to the future
That the world is changing ever more quickly may be a cliché, but that makes it no less true: all sales leaders know that they need to anticipate changes that could turn into opportunities or threats. Yet the best leaders move beyond acknowledgement to commitment.They make trend analysis a formal part of the sales process through systematic investments of time, money, and people. Building and sustaining the capability to take a forward-looking view of the market is not easy. In discussions with more than 200 sales leaders while researching our new book, Sales Growth, two common characteristics emerged: the mind-set of sales leadership and resource commitment.
Sales leaders must consistently monitor the macro-environment in search of sales opportunities, no easy task given the relentless pressure to hit near-term targets. Forward planning must be part of someone’s job description—not just part of top management’s lengthy to-do list—with sufficient resources to take advantage of the best opportunities. Companies have to be willing to take risks now to create sales capacity long before the revenue will materialize. More than half of the fast-growing companies1 we analyzed look at least one year out, and 10 percent look more than three years out.
After planning, sales leaders aren’t afraid to put their money where they think the growth will be: 45 percent of fast-growing companies invest more than 6 percent of their sales budget on activities supporting goals that are at least a year out—a significant commitment in an environment where sales leaders fight for each dollar of investment.
[For more, read HERE ...]
Thursday, 28 April 2016
How to Get Prospects To Use You Instead of Their Existing Supplier
How often does this happen? You make a call to a new prospect to
introduce them to the idea of using your products and services and they
tell you that they already have a supplier with whom they are
happy,thank you. Not you, I am sure, but poor salespeople would say,
"Oh, that's okay good-bye." They would lose the opportunity of ever
doing business with this person simply because they had never worked out
what to say, when this objection comes up.
The objection probably comes up frequently too. What if you had the perfect answer to this objection? Then every time it came up, you would have an answer to keep the prospect interested?
I suggest you don't immediately start data dumping all over the customer about how much better your product or service . The best tactic is to show understanding and get the customer talking by asking questions.
Let's explore some different ways of dealing with this:-
Start every answer to an objection with empathy to build rapport.
"That's fine Mr/Mrs ______ I understand that you would most likely have a supplier already." (note you use empathy to build rapport.)
Then continue with the option of your choice below:-
Option 1.
"May I ask who you are using?"
"What is it you particularly like about your existing supplier? (wait for answer)
What else would you like them to do for you to make them absolutely perfect? (wait for answer)
So, if we could do or give you (what they like about their current supplier) and (the thing that would make them perfect), you might want to talk to us further do you think? What time would suit you to get together next week, Monday or Tuesday?"
Option 2.
"What would happen if your current supplier, all of a sudden, could not fulfill your requirements? (or ran out of stock?)" (Depending on their answer, you would continue with:-)
"Howabout we send you our contact details and information about our services so we can be your standby if such a scenario occurs?
Option 3.
"How long have you been using your existing supplier?" (wait for answer and repeat what they say)
"Sometimes it is good to check whether you are paying the right price for services when you have been using the same supplier for a while. Howabout I give you a quote for using our services so you can make sure you are getting the most value for your money? Please note when comparing prices that our products/services also include ........." (add your value here - it may put doubt in their mind.)
Option 4.
"What would have to happen for you to consider changing your supplier?"
Option 5.
"That's great that you are happy with your supplier. When you changed to your current supplier, you must have changed for a specific reason. Do you remember what that was? When you next get around to contemplating a change, what would you want your next supplier to do?" (It may give you a chance to offer what they want.)
Option 6.
"I realise you may not be interested in our services right now but I would love to send you some information about our products/services so you will be well informed for the future."
Option 7.
"I realise you are happy with your existing supplier, so I am not asking you to give us all of your business. I would like you to consider giving us 1% of your business initially, so you have the opportunity to compare our services with theirs and see the difference. How does that sound?
Option 8.
If none of these work for you try this:
"So what do I/we have to do to be able to do business with you?"
It is recommended you put your favourite option on a wall in front of your phone so you will never choke on this objection again!
The objection probably comes up frequently too. What if you had the perfect answer to this objection? Then every time it came up, you would have an answer to keep the prospect interested?
I suggest you don't immediately start data dumping all over the customer about how much better your product or service . The best tactic is to show understanding and get the customer talking by asking questions.
Let's explore some different ways of dealing with this:-
Start every answer to an objection with empathy to build rapport.
"That's fine Mr/Mrs ______ I understand that you would most likely have a supplier already." (note you use empathy to build rapport.)
Then continue with the option of your choice below:-
Option 1.
"May I ask who you are using?"
"What is it you particularly like about your existing supplier? (wait for answer)
What else would you like them to do for you to make them absolutely perfect? (wait for answer)
So, if we could do or give you (what they like about their current supplier) and (the thing that would make them perfect), you might want to talk to us further do you think? What time would suit you to get together next week, Monday or Tuesday?"
Option 2.
"What would happen if your current supplier, all of a sudden, could not fulfill your requirements? (or ran out of stock?)" (Depending on their answer, you would continue with:-)
"Howabout we send you our contact details and information about our services so we can be your standby if such a scenario occurs?
Option 3.
"How long have you been using your existing supplier?" (wait for answer and repeat what they say)
"Sometimes it is good to check whether you are paying the right price for services when you have been using the same supplier for a while. Howabout I give you a quote for using our services so you can make sure you are getting the most value for your money? Please note when comparing prices that our products/services also include ........." (add your value here - it may put doubt in their mind.)
Option 4.
"What would have to happen for you to consider changing your supplier?"
Option 5.
"That's great that you are happy with your supplier. When you changed to your current supplier, you must have changed for a specific reason. Do you remember what that was? When you next get around to contemplating a change, what would you want your next supplier to do?" (It may give you a chance to offer what they want.)
Option 6.
"I realise you may not be interested in our services right now but I would love to send you some information about our products/services so you will be well informed for the future."
Option 7.
"I realise you are happy with your existing supplier, so I am not asking you to give us all of your business. I would like you to consider giving us 1% of your business initially, so you have the opportunity to compare our services with theirs and see the difference. How does that sound?
Option 8.
If none of these work for you try this:
"So what do I/we have to do to be able to do business with you?"
It is recommended you put your favourite option on a wall in front of your phone so you will never choke on this objection again!
Tuesday, 26 April 2016
Developing a customer-experience vision
To provide a distinctive experience for customers, an
organization must unite around the goal of meeting their true needs.
Done well, the effort can power a vast amount of innovation.
Read rest of article here.
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