Introduction
Life Science Client Sought to Transform Sales to Drive Market Segment Share Growth
A life sciences client was enjoying strong top-line sales growth but faced competitive headwinds causing challenges to its market share and creating limited prospecting opportunities for the sales team. While its Research segment growth outpaced the market, its Applied segment was experiencing slower growth. At the same time, the number of sales opportunities had been declining over the past two years.
Even though the client transformed its sales strategy to a market segment-driven approach in 2021, its business units continued to operate in product-centric teams. After leveraging the expertise of Alexander Group in 2021 for its commercial transformation, the client sought to continue the partnership in an effort to evolve their go-to-market model and grow share, enhance the customer experience and foster relationships with new customers.
Project Approach
Assess and Analyze to Build New Coverage Model
Alexander Group sought to work collaboratively with the client to assess, analyze and implement a new coverage model. The success metrics of the current model were evaluated alongside more than 50 interviews that provided qualitative input. Throughout the engagement, Alexander Group aligned on the future state coverage model with the design team and supported the team as they implemented the model for the upcoming fiscal year.
Key Findings
Increasing Technical and Product Knowledge Available to Customers
Since 2020, the client’s win rate has been increasing, but they have also seen a decrease in the number of sales opportunities. This indicates limited new customer growth and prospecting. Customer trends indicate that more customers are demanding technical and workflow expertise, yet, the customer deployed half as many product specialists as its competitors. The demand for enhanced product knowledge influenced:
Designing a Geographic-Based Coverage Model
To simplify how the client approached customers, the market segment-coverage model evolved into one that was geographic-based. Sales representatives became a single point of contact for their territories to drive more prospecting.
Increasing Availability of Product Specialists
To address customer demands, the client increased the headcount of product specialists dedicated to each product line. With the number of these specialists increasing by more than 250%, these specialists serve as experts and drive sales strategies for their respective products.
Evolving the Role of Digital
The role of the digital sales representative transformed to focus on lead generation activities that drive prospecting and ultimately increase the number of sales opportunities.
Enhancing Post-Sale Customer Support
To improve the customer experience after a sale has closed, a customer support function was added. This streamlines post-sale activities while freeing time for sales representatives to focus on selling and prospecting.
Recommendations and Outcomes:
Driving Segment Share Growth and Enhancing Customer Experience
With this new sales strategy, the client anticipates realizing an overall increase in market share, an increase in new opportunities and new accounts, and positive voice-of-customer feedback within six months to one year of implementation. The client expects this will grow its share by 3% annually, attributed to new customer growth and enhanced prospecting. Customers will enjoy an improved customer experience while receiving strengthened support from the sales representatives.
So far, the client has shared that the implementation process created the right level of sales leadership engagement and buy-in during a large-scale commercial change.
Creating an Optimized Prospecting and Sales Pipeline
Misaligned coverage models can reduce the ability of sales teams and sales representatives to prospect and drive new customer growth. Alexander Group has the life sciences expertise to help you align sales goals with prospecting strategies and customer demands.
We can help with all elements of your sales compensation program.
About Alexander Group
Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.
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