Sales models in distribution are under stress like never before. Traditional and non-traditional competitors are reaching into what used to be “your” customers’ pockets as they become more receptive to change and new supply resources.

There’s a good article in the October Harvard Business Review, Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy (p. 23), that discusses the importance of strategy and execution in getting profitable growth. Part of the article identifies three variables that drive the productivity of a sales model: customer call capacity, close rate, and profit per sale.

These variables are at the heart of how market leaders differentiate from “old” sales models. Those who adopt market analytics and sales metrics target better leads, better qualify opportunities, and match profitable product/service packages to their sweet spot customer segments.

There is a growing gap between strategy and sales execution. Traditionally, sales reps have “owned” the customer knowledge and relationship, with company leaders unable to get a clear view of market realities, threats and opportunities. If your company has not started a process to get cleaner data and better visibility into customers, start the journey now.

By modeling market and account profiles, our customers have been able to better target the highest potential territories, product categories and end-user customer segments, down to the account level. Better visibility means they can focus sales and marketing effort to improve the three critical variables above.

A given set of sales resources have only so much bandwidth. So when I see distribution companies that aren’t working to give their sellers the best tools to increase their capacity, close rates or efficiency, they are still operating on sales models that used to work well, but have not adapted to the economic and technological sea changes of the past few years. And where will they be in three to five years if they don’t adapt?