From Bidding to Selling
The Situation
A $3.2 billion food packaging division was competing almost entirely on price. The sales organization had been built for transactional, bid-based selling of commodity products — take the spec, quote the number, discount if you have to. Margin eroded a little more every year, and the sales force had no mechanism to stop it because nothing in their process, their skills, or their incentives pointed anywhere else.
Marketing understood the customer. Sales talked to the customer. The two rarely met.
What Was Done
Designed a new sales operating strategy that shifted the organization from commodity transactions toward value-added custom packaging solutions built on consumer insight. That required three things to change at once, which is why partial versions of this fail: the selling methodology itself — a consultative approach, designed and then actually trained and deployed; the alignment between marketing and sales so that insight reached the customer conversation; and the operating processes that supported the new motion rather than the old one.
What Changed
- Approximately $75M in incremental revenue*
- Improved profit margins and market share
- Higher customer retention
- Improved employee and customer satisfaction
Relevant if: your sales team defends price instead of creating value, and you suspect the problem is the system rather than the people.