A strategy for surviving a nuclear winter!

25 June 2024

I’m not suggesting we’re about to have a nuclear winter. I think it’s more likely that the industrial sector is about to emerge from one. But here’s my four-step strategy for survival anyway.

Let’s assume that you’re a typical industrial organization with a traditional commissioned, semi-autonomous sales force.

STEP ONE. Centralize customer service.

I don’t mean move representatives to a central location. I mean centralize the management of the team and have the team work on a single queue of inbound tasks (quote requests, orders, and issues). Build two teams within customer service. Tier one (generalists) and tier two (specialists). Allocate all inbound tasks to tier one and have operators call on tier-two specialists for assistance when required. Do not transfer task ownership.

STEP TWO. Rationalize your sales team.

Divide your salespeople into three groups. Pure hunters (you probably have none of these). Technically strong account managers. Technically weak account managers.

Let your technically weak account managers go. If you have a pure hunter, simplify their role so they can focus exclusively on winning new business and handing it off to customer service. Move some of your technically strong account managers to tier-two customer service, and have the balance spend 100% of their time in the field visiting existing clients looking for incremental business. (Retain them if they generate more than they cost).

STEP THREE. Optimize for speed.

Start measuring—and obsess over minimizing—your customer engagement lead time. I mean the total time from initial inquiry through to delivery.

In most organizations, there is no focus on speed, and existing metrics are meaningless. You want to measure the lead time from when the customer sent the first email in the thread to when the resulting order was actually delivered (not from quote generation to shipping).

STEP FOUR. Innovate.

Use the quiet times to prepare for spring. Innovate. Send the most senior person in the organization to spend days at a time on customer sites, observing them at work and developing a profound understanding of the economics of their organizations.

Generate ideas for new products or service wrappers for existing ones.

Do NOT skip this step. Do NOT skimp on the requirement to literally spend days on customer sites!