Sales

Why should you choose PwC to advise you on sales strategy? The answer is “BXT”. “B” stands for business success – with online and offline sales strategies, globally standardised processes and clever target operating models. “X” stands for perfect customer experiences, powered by our design thinking expertise, among other things. And “T” stands for technology expertise for all relevant systems.

We support you in aligning all your sales channels to different customer groups, integrating your digital commerce strategies into your overall sales, differentiating your web stores from competitor marketplaces, and effectively personalising your customer interactions with the right SRM (Supplier Relationship Management) and CRM data. Whether you want to strategically develop key accounts, find new customers using predictive sales, simplify processes (M2L and L2O), automate quoting (CPQ) and back office with chatbots, RPA and AI (O2C), or support your systems with CRM, PIM, webshops and SRM: PwC can power the digital transformation of your sales organisation, involving all stakeholders from the beginning.

PwC develops the detailed implementation of your corporate strategy, together with you. The result is a sustainable sales strategy with clear goals and links to the supply chain, production, purchasing and finance.

To achieve this, we analyse your current sales strategy and budget, linking all available internal information with external market and customer information. We forecast the purchasing behaviour of your target groups and work with you to develop a strategy that increases your planning reliability (including integration into your S&OP process), chance of success and profit.

The new normal also requires organisational change: many sales organisations must become more powerful and at the same time more efficient. Reducing costs while increasing sales success is possible with the correct measures, which PwC develops and implements knowledgeably and enthusiastically. In recent years, we have been able to achieve sustainable sales cost reductions of 10 to 30 percent without loss of revenue, and in most cases even with an increase in revenue.

Together with you, we optimise the customer approach of your sales team through potential, demand and behaviour-driven customer micro-segmentation. The size of your sales teams is precisely adjusted to the needs of defined customer groups and regions. In addition, we ensure that a specially trained inside sales force provides optimal support to the field sales force. This can be done, for example, through a Shared Service Center (SSC). Together, we design your organisational and operational structure according to a Commercial Target Operating Model (CTOM). We standardise and digitise your sales organisation globally, reducing local and manual effort. We identify opportunities to outsource functions and relocate transactions to web stores. The bottom line is that you have less effort and sell more.

Serving customers in the digital age with traditional methods is unlikely to work. Especially when they expect instant services across different time zones, languages and cultures. For this, companies need:

• suitable key account management
• practicable key account processes
• the necessary team sizes and qualifications
• a high-performance CRM system (which allows collaboration across organisational, country and subject boundaries).

PwC supports you in making your key account management staff fit for the future. Together with you, we analyse which of your customers you should look after and in what way. We define key account processes for you and determine the optimal key account management organisation. We develop cooperation processes between individual key account teams and train them with the necessary technological, commercial, digital and social know-how.

Traditional sales channels such as field services, call centres, web stores and stationary retail are increasingly being supplemented – or even supplanted – by digital B2C, B2B and B2B2C platforms. The SRM systems of such open and closed platforms, be it Amazon, Alibaba or even SAP Ariba and SupplyOn, trigger order processes completely digitally and in real time. These platforms are relatively new but growing rapidly, and real platform experts are hard to find at the moment. Many companies do not yet have professional sales platform strategies and may be missing out on revenue potential.

PwC provides you with platform specialists who have known the market since its inception. We show you:

• which platforms are available
• what their future prospects are
• which platforms are best suited to your company 
• how you can register your company on these platforms
• how your company should present itself on them

Together with you, we design how your platform teams will work, and train team members in maintaining your company's presence, tender strategies, offer formulations, pricing concepts, auction tactics, and so on. Use our platform competencies to maximise your revenue potential.

Qualified and successful sales employees are increasingly hard to find and keep hold of. Existing employees should therefore be supported as best as possible by removing all repetitive manual tasks where possible. This is where automated omnichannel solutions make a big contribution. The simplest form is chatbots, which have now reached a reasonable level of maturity. They can be used in most business languages and are capable of conducting simple dialogs in a structured form, advising customers on specific topics, from product descriptions to price information, shopping cart help and even triggering workflows. If a dialog becomes too complex, they can always refer to a human counterpart.

Bots become more powerful through RPA. RPA can automate repetitive and error-prone tasks, such as transferring data from one system to another. It performs desktop procedures, clicks and copy-paste routines from certain fields to other fields. It succeeds where humans struggle because it repeats constantly recurring activities around the clock without error. It is often used to:

• update customer master data tables across different systems
• transfer product and pricing information, e.g. from the pricing manager's spreadsheet to the ERP, the website and the product catalogue
• format reports automatically
• Reply to and send emails with highly structured format and content

At its highest level of sophistication, AI offers natural language, pattern recognition, machine learning and independent logics. Its “intelligence” lies in filling in gaps as the human brain would. It can:

• fill in missing letters or words in a text, enabling it to fully digitise thousands of scanned contracts and extract the desired information
• Formulate complete sentences, helping chatbots engage in credible dialogue
• Support RPA scripts, handling exceptions and filling in missing information so the bot can continue its work
• extract product names, material IDs and order numbers from an email, research price, availability and order status from ERP, and reply to the customer, or even take orders automatically via email

For salespeople, researching prospective new customers and contacting them with suitable offers is a time-consuming, low-success-rate task. But AI can support here as well, removing repetitive elements and maximising opportunities. It can:

• Identify and suggest the most promising customers
• Collect internal information from productive customers, such as master data, order history, customer value analysis
• Compare internal data with publicly available information (such as company financial data, annual reports, websites, and credit checks)
• Identify patterns with a much higher degree of accuracy than humans would
• Deliver lead lists prioritised by value and probability of winning, along with a recommendation of which products and services to offer
• identify underserved customers with cross-sell and upsell potential 
• Identify and quantify value at risk from churn

Predictive Sales answers sales' most important questions:

• Which target group promises the highest revenue and the best margin?
• Which leads have the highest probability of being converted into successful deals?
• Which customers have the greatest cross-selling and upselling potential?
• Which existing customers will add the most value?
• What offer should sales make next?
• Which customers can maximise share of wallet?
• Which customers are most at risk of churn, and how can this be prevented?

The use of Shared Service Center (SSC) has been tried and tested for decades. What is new is the inclusion of sales. Whereas until recently only internal functions were centralised, customer-facing units are now also shared. Entire internal services are transferred to an SSC, often leaving only the field sales force working on a localised basis. This needs to be carefully managed, as the customer relationship is an extremely sensitive asset that requires close attention. In addition, especially in Europe and Asia, local languages and dialects are numerous and affect customer interactions.

PwC therefore typically recommends a phased approach based on business risk, staffing potential and ease of implementation.

• An initial phase can include most activities that cannot be automated and involve only non-verbal communication, such as emails for small and medium-sized customers. Phone calls, the most complex activities, and large customers remain localised.
• A second phase can include the most complex activities that require more customer understanding and experienced agents, as well as phone calls in the local language.
• A third phase may extend to servicing most activities, even for large customers, establishing individual agents as dedicated contacts for these customers.

This phased approach is enabled by continuous training of centre agents to handle more complex tasks, better understand the intricacies of customers, and acquire appropriate language skills.

Most companies still use conventional financial indicators for their sales management and reporting: Number of Customers, revenue and profit margin. These KPIs remain important, but in the Big Data age, they are only part of the necessary metrics for optimal sales management. As a global leader in finance and reporting, PwC can support you in adopting holistic concepts for sales management and reporting. Our approach includes answers to questions like these:

• How do you set up integrated reporting between sales and finance/controlling?
• What should an integrated commercial dashboard look like?
• Which digital channels do you use – and with what success?
• How do profit margins differ between sales channels?
• How high are your quotation and sales costs per business transaction?
• What contribution margins do you achieve per customer visit?
• Which BI tool should you use and how?

Detailed customer data-based reporting allows for sales management that is more granular and target-oriented than ever before. To this end, even marketing data such as brand impact and brand value development are incorporated. The dovetailing of marketing and sales, as required by Customer-Centric Transformation, becomes real here.

“Commercial Steering” is what we call our holistic approach. The term refers to a steering system that links all commercial functions: sales, marketing, service, pricing, and so on.