Vertiv EMEA Sales Transformation
How to successfully implement a go-to-market strategy across a large multi-national sales organisation? Do you want to read more about the case first?
Contributors
NJ Flensborg
Managing Partner, Commerzial
“Transformations are here to stay and you as managers simply need to align to that – so you’re ready, not only to win today’s battles, – but also tomorrow’s battles”
Karsten Winther
President EMEA, Vertiv
“So when driving sales transformations, it is to a large degree about changing people’s behavior. So getting key sales leadership individuals to actually co-own, believe in it, study it, and actually drive it as if it was their own… was and still is the very most important feature of success in the execution.”
Alex Brew
Sales Director, UK & Ireland, Vertiv
“The commonality in sales language that has been instilled into the entire sales community – all of our KPIs and mechanisms for how and why we measure and monitor them are understood at all levels of the organization.”
Cristina Querzé
HR Director, EMEA, Vertiv
“We were trying to take the best of competencies of the sales population, we can definitely see how that has changed, improved, and elevated over the past three years. But a key element is that we now hold managers and leaders accountable for continuing that development”
Achievements
5-10%
Increased win-rates
15-20%
Over achievement in orders
15-17%
Increased sales productivity
Case
In early 2018 Vertiv EMEA developed a new Go-to-market strategy focusing on creating a more customer-focused organization, shifting commercial attention to account management and cross-functional sales whilst driving targeted product sales through both direct and indirect channels.
To achieve a Go-to-market direction, a sales transformation across the EMEA organization (approximately 600 salespeople and sales managers) was needed.
About Vertiv: Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks, and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling, and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extend from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, USA, Vertiv employs approximately 20,000 people and does business in more than 130 countries.
Solution
The solution design included emerging technologies:
1. Close involvement and engagement of the entire sales department through AI and NLP enabled maturity assessment survey securing early engagement, ownership, and input to project design
2. Strong market and sales performance data competence enabling transformation team to create fact-based decisions and a strong foothold and recognition in the sales organization
3. Engagement of top management and country managers in translating internal and external data into initiatives and actions to drive short- and long-term growth and preparing tracking of performance and results
4. Execution of fast-track Roadmap through the established sales transformation office and close follow-up and support on KPIs to realize benefits and achieve set targets
Challenge
There were 4 major challenges implementing the strategy:
1. Different understandings of how customers and partners should be approached, bringing down productivity and eliminating economy of scale initiatives
2. Salesforce was predominantly reactive and product-focused in its approach with customers, leading to missed opportunities, lack of control, and lower efficiency
3. The difficulty for sales managers to make solid strategic decisions based on data and insight in commercial performance across the organization
4. The lack of a common commercial language made it difficult to be precise when diagnosing customer problems and prescribing the right cure to the challenges and sharing best practices
“Adapt to the future of sales transformations”
NJ Flensborg
Managing Partner, Commerzial
“Grow numbers with sales transformation”
Karsten Winter
President, EMEA Sales, Vertiv
“Grow people with sales transformation”
Cristina Querzé
Human Resource Director EMEA, Vertiv
“Implementing sales transformation”
Alex Brew
Sales Director, UK & Ireland, Vertiv
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