A major consumer packaged goods company determined that it could improve its competitive advantage in a rapidly changing market combined with a corporate merger by refocusing its sales organization to be more customer focused.

DHC worked with a senior level task force to develop and implement a strategy to integrate the merging organizations and align the combined sales organization’s structure, processes and systems, culture and incentive plans.

DHC designed tools that allowed the organization to establish effective and efficient efforts among the major functional units (Sales, Customer Marketing, Category Management, Trade Marketing, Brand Marketing, Finance and Customer Service) against:

• Alignment – with customers or business units
• Reporting – to brand or sales management
• Deployment – in headquarters or the field

Next, the team used a DHC tool to develop a chart of customer relationships by channel of distribution that would optimize service to its major customers based on a segmentation analysis of the customer base. Combining results of the two tools, yielded structure to the sales organization by channel of distribution with clearly identified relationships defined by alignment, reporting and deployment for headquarters and sales team support as well as sales force type.

Finally, the organization was restructured to allow the highest ROI on resources aligned against customers while ensuring outstanding performance against customer expectations.

The organization was able to reduce its sales force while improving the effectiveness and efficiency of go-to-market strategy. The team won shareholder approval of the restructure and merger plan and implemented major organizational change in record time. Customer satisfaction as defined by quantitative measures already in place is expected to improve dramatically.


© COPYRIGHT 2009 Dechert-Hampe Co.