"A company must also adapt its sales model as it pursues new customer segments"

"In recovering from the crisis, the effectiveness of sales efforts will be of strategic importance for companies. 

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Few companies have adequately adapted their sales models to fundamental shifts in the way customers make purchase decisions. Buying has long been framed in terms of a hierarchy-of-effects model in which customers move from awareness to interest to desire to action. However, the AIDA formula and its variants—the basis (often unconsciously) for sales activities in most firms—is becoming less relevant as buyers work through their own parallel activity streams in making a decision. 

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Effective selling requires an understanding of where customers are, how they navigate between various streams of activity, and when to interact with them. 

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Despite technology advances, most sales models are the ad hoc accumulation of years of reactive decisions made by multiple managers pursuing different goals.

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Like perishable goods in grocery stores, any sales model has a sell-by date. Across a market life cycle, customers typically start as generalists and over time become more discriminating.

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Decisions about scope, or where you play in a market, are central to any business strategy and sales model... But in practice, scope is determined by sales call patterns—where reps’ time and expense are allocated. Scope must also take into account opportunity costs. Money and time allocated to accounts A and B are not available for accounts C, D, and so on. Executives know that you can’t be all things to all people, yet they fail to make this an explicit and managed part of their sales models. They basically tell salespeople, either directly in meetings or implicitly through compensation plans, to “go forth and multiply.” With an eye to meeting their volume quotas, salespeople then sell to anyone, often at discounted prices, leading to lost revenue and damaged brand positioning. Profitable growth requires clarity about how to “separate the suspects from the prospects.”

Most sales models are the ad hoc accumulation of years of reactive decisions made by multiple managers pursuing different goals.

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A company must also adapt its sales model as it pursues new customer segments."

Trechos retirados de "Selling After the Crisis"