Innovating Sales in Mature Companies

As a follow up to my previous post regarding sales’ connection to customer success, I’ve felt a follow-up was needed to address similar practices—sales and customer success—in mature companies.

Mature companies, as opposed to start-ups, have had an opportunity develop sophisticated means for ensuring that sales and customer success stay aligned—from standard contracts to myriad support teams. When it comes to building new customer relationships, mature companies and start-ups share the same two tenets of a) needing to urgently close business, and b) making customers wildly happy and successful.

In mature companies there are different reasons to connect closing business and customer success, but mostly these two principles can and should be connected to ensure near and long-term business growth.

The challenge in the mature company is to innovate in the area of sales/customer success.

The best mature companies start with ultra-smart pursuit teams—cross-functional teams that drawn on the expertise of people that have a deep knowledge and skill. A pursuit team crafts a powerful, concrete value proposition that is tightly tied to the company’s ability to deliver on that value prop. Product experts, service gurus, financial wizards, technical hot-shots — each draw on their expertise and connection with their area of the broader organization.

The results are remarkable—not only are great proposals delivered to prospects, but also each proposal is tightly in sync with what the company can stand behind. HP is a great example. While slightly dated, a great, very public example was their big win as part of the General Motors IT outsourcing bid process. My good friend Mike McGrorey is on a pursuit team at HP where he brings his deep experience at the company and his analytical skills developed in finance leadership roles over many years.

If you’re a big company that needs to innovate in the sales process or a small company that aspires to land bigger and bigger accounts, building an expert pursuit team should be on your 2008 to-do list.