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Such success stories are of little relevance if they are just a stroke of luck and can’t be replicated. From what we learned in our interviews, they are not. Sales executives make their own luck by developing the ability to peek around corners and consistently identify sales opportunities that may not materialize for 12 or 18 months – or longer.

How do these managers decide when to pounce on a tactical opportunity or commit in advance to investments in a market that will pay off years from now? The leaders we interviewed do not simply gamble on market movements; they have institutionalized a forward-looking approach. They do their homework and have a fact-based rationale for new initiatives and investments. And they have built a track record of success that gives them credibility in their organizations.

There are many ways of generating this forward-looking view of the market, such as investing in the analysis of new trends and potential winning concepts, and encouraging customers to commit to new trends. Both require the right mind-set and a willingness to commit resources.

Leaders do not simply gamble on market movements – they institutionalize a forward-looking approach.

A contract manufacturing company that builds products for IT equipment makers has had great success with a dedicated trends-analysis function. It deploys a team of speculative market analysts whose job is to predict which hardware products will have meaningful volume in the next two to three years – and which potential client companies are likely to develop such products. That gives the company a perspective on its target customers a couple of years before they become large.

The contract manufacturer uses several strategies to build these insights, including spending time with the venture-capital firms that fund new companies. It adheres to the simple strategy of following the money. It is a safe bet that a good proportion of the companies that receive significant rather than speculative investments from the venture-capital firms will end up as exactly the fast-growing companies the manufacturer is interested in.

The manufacturer also speaks to customers about which emerging products and technologies it is pursuing, and it continuously evaluates the supply chains of its customers (and of its customers’ customers) for emerging sales targets. One of the outputs of this analysis is a list of small but fast-growing companies that may evolve into major users of contract-manufacturing capacity. The manufacturer then invests in building relationships with these companies to convert them into customers. The investment is essentially a subsidy – taking on a customer whose initial volume is too low to be economically attractive. Some of these emerging companies will never grow into marquee customers. A few, however, will become major players, and the manufacturer will have locked in a profitable order stream. In less than two years, this group was consistently able to deliver a 15 percent return on investment (ROI) by identifying new opportunities the company would otherwise have been unlikely to get.

As we mentioned at the start of the chapter, one high-tech company has created a high-powered solutions unit that is dedicated to preparing major customers to commit early to new trends. The team is staffed with a mix of former consultants, professors, and respected industry leaders from high-potential market segments. Its task is to find ways to accelerate demand by influencing important decision makers to be early adopters.

The ultimate goal is to help the company get customers to commit to investing in the next evolution of technology ahead of its competitors. So the group spends its time producing thought-provoking industry perspectives, quantifying the benefits of its offering for individual companies, and building relationships with influential company executives and government officials. The most compelling ideas can reduce adoption time for new technology and accelerate uptake in an entire customer segment or country. The company then benefits disproportionately, given that it already has a strong market position.

Building and sustaining the capability to take a forward-looking view of the market is not easy. As we looked across all of these great sellers, two common characteristics emerged: the mind-set of sales leadership and resource commitment. Sales leaders must consistently monitor the macro-environment in search of sales opportunities. Even good sales leaders find this challenging, given the relentless pressure to hit near-term targets. This is why resource commitment is important.

In other words, forward planning must be part of someone’s job description, not just part of top management’s lengthy to-do list. Sometimes, it falls within marketing but, in many cases, it is sales’ responsibility. The level of investment will vary depending on the company and its context. At the high end, we see formal operations such as the market-shaping team at the IT supplier. At the other end, forward-looking analysis is embedded into annual capacity planning. The most common arrangement is a small, centralized sales team whose responsibility is to scan opportunities and convert those it finds into tangible sales leads. Many companies that we see investing real resources ahead of demand are equally rigorous in taking costs out of sales. A conscious eye on where resources are no longer important creates the capacity to invest.

Forward planning must be part of someone’s job description.

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Thinking three moves ahead is vital in any game and essential to sales growth. It does not come automatically, however. Companies have to follow the lead of the high-tech player we mentioned at the top, which spotted the multimillion-dollar opportunity of a big trend. They need to learn the lesson of the automaker and build their sales resources on the ground well ahead of time in order to end up among the market leaders. And like the manufacturer that analyzed its potential customers, they need to embed the concept of looking forward into the sales organization’s mind-set to guarantee that impressive 15 percent rate of return. EMC’s William J. Teuber, Jr. has certainly embraced these ideas, as has Karim Amin, from Siemens Power & Gas, as both explain in the interviews that follow this chapter.

In the next chapter, we’ll see how top sales managers don’t just take a macroview of opportunities; they’re also able to turn the microscope onto their existing markets to find the untapped pockets of growth.

Interview: William J. Teuber, Jr., EMC

Vice-Chairman

How do you anticipate megatrends such as cloud computing?

We use a multipronged approach. We follow our cutting-edge customers closely to see what they are doing. We listen to our engineers – our innovation engine – to hear where they want to drive things. We have a sophisticated business-development team that monitors new company formation carefully. We work with research universities to discover which emerging technologies have potential commercial applications. Then we marry all that thinking with what our customers are thinking. Trends don’t appear clearly from any one source. They come into focus when you bring a mixture of perspectives together.

How has your go-to-market model scaled up with your dramatic growth?

It has scaled with our opportunity. We have learned to focus where our opportunity exists, both with current customers and outside our base. We identify opportunities by region and by customer, and we get very granular with irrefutable data to see where we can move the needle. Having that discipline gives us the ability to devise a plan to capture dramatic growth through our direct sales force as well as through channel partners.

How do you reconcile the quarterly heartbeat of your sales organization with the need to invest ahead of demand to capture long-term opportunities?

In a publicly traded company with a public report card every 90 days, you have to do both. In our international operations, we introduced a three-year sales planning process to get beyond the 90-day mentality of “How will I make my number this quarter?” We monitor how markets are going to develop and prioritize opportunities that will generate the best growth over the next four to eight quarters. We’ve also created a Rapid Growth Markets Board made up of senior leaders who hold meetings in those markets and link back to the rest of the company, so people in product development can plan accordingly.

You have almost doubled revenues in the past five years and are planning to grow faster than your markets. How do you sustain such growth?

You have to have the right strategy and the right offering, and your sales organization has to communicate the benefits of that to the customer. In order to build our portfolio and market reach, we’ve bought 35 companies over the last five years. Doing cross-company sales integration successfully is one of the hardest things to do. We’ve learned a lot from experience.

Ultimately, you have to have the best people to execute your strategy. I’m betting my job on everyone who works for me. Therefore, I’m going to select the top people to represent our company in the marketplace. EMC has what I consider to be the gold standard of sales forces. There is an aura about it. To be in sales at EMC is a badge of honor. That’s why we attract and retain the right people – to make sure we have the best talent bench in our sales force.

Interview: Karim Amin, Siemens

CEO Global Sales, Power & Gas

How do you balance the quarterly heartbeat of sales with a longer-term vision?

I head a global sales organization for power generation that was formed recently from a fragmented business unit and a country-specific organization. We have undergone a lot of changes since this consolidation, and moving to a longer-term mind-set is an ongoing process.

A quarterly perspective can be an organization’s Achilles’ heel because you can miss the chance to adapt and make the decisions that will deliver success three or four years down the line. My role is therefore geared toward anticipating trends and constantly adapting the organization to make it fit the ever-changing and complex landscape. Of course I also spend time on quarterly figures, but I have the privilege of seeing the bigger picture. I don’t have to take just a country, regional, specific product or business-line view.

Seventy percent of my time is spent understanding why we are winning, why we are losing, and which customers are changing their buying behavior and why. This requires diagnostic tools – CRM systems – that are capable of correlating data points and building dashboards that help visualize them. Then, of course, I feed all this information back into the wider organization. This helps inform new products, R&D investment, new business models, etc.

How do your sales operations support you since the consolidation?

We’re investing a lot in our sales operations to better inform and support our sales strategy. They’re able to do this by collating all the data from the market and running diagnostics using CRM tools to help reduce complexity and provide an overview of what is happening in the market. We see, for example, the impact of shifts in technology in the power-generation market. Customers are demanding more from OEMs than just big, efficient equipment.

The sales operations are supported by two pillars: the CRM system and the skills of the core team, which brings the human factor to the diagnostics. From their output, we are able to adapt not just the sales organization but also the entire value chain. They’ve helped clarify where we stand in terms of supply-chain efficiency or time to market, for example. In complex organizations such as Siemens, this is extremely beneficial.

The new organization is definitely helping to define the market trends more effectively and faster. We have broken down some silos. For example, all our data from 32 different countries and five different business units came in discrete “boxes.” You would need to open 50 to 60 boxes just to understand what was happening, let alone what the business could look like in the future. Today, with the integrated sales force, we need to open only ten boxes to get that information.

How do you help your team implement the new approach?

Change is always tough, especially in an organization that stretches across so many countries and different disciplines. It all starts from a very clear message around why we need to change. When people really believe that change is necessary, and the reasons behind it are crystal clear, then implementation becomes a matter of how fast you do it and how smoothly. In our case, we spent almost a year getting the message across to more than 2,000 employees – not just about the new way we were structured but about the way we were thinking and the way we should be approaching customers, markets, and opportunities.

We worked both bottom up and top down. Top down, we had a group putting in place very concrete KPIs to measure progress. It was a very structured approach. We agreed on the top five or six things we needed to focus on in the first hundred days, the second hundred, and the third hundred. The bottom-up part involved putting change agents in every corner of the organization. We had 60 to 70 of them, and we made it very clear to them that they were playing an important role in the future of the organization. They were part of our staff strategy meetings, and they received a lot of information about the why and the how of our change.

Success will come from changing people’s mind-sets, and that’s very difficult to measure. You have to see them in pressure situations to see whether they stick with the new way of doing things or revert back to their old behavior.

How do you tune your sales operating model for future growth?

The sales operations team is definitely the glue that keeps everything in sync and that gives guidance for the future. In these early stages, we are setting up the architecture and the infrastructure to improve processes. We need to work on capability building and molding the organization, given our disparate backgrounds. The sales operations team’s task is to set up clear foundations for how we work, how we use the data-mining tools that we have, how we provide and receive information, and how we manage it efficiently. In the future, we expect the team to be a flagship learning organization.

How important is all the process alignment for growth as well as for effectiveness and efficiency?

It’s extremely important. We make an enormous effort to understand where the best opportunities are for us, and we have extensive knowledge across our markets on which customers are more likely to win projects, where the next hotspots will be, etc. This information is critical. We need to move from this being an individual effort – such as someone working really hard in North America to understand which project we should focus on – to a collective effort. We will have more impact by looking at opportunities globally, and then we can allocate resources appropriately or find new opportunities ourselves.