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On Strategy is a series of thought pieces on issues of corporate strategy written by staff of Sacerdote & Co., Inc. Below are abstracts of essays in recent issues of On Strategy. To obtain electronic or printed copies of the complete papers, please click on the appropriate boxes at the bottom of this screen. New papers are published semi-annually.
Many companies experience significant revenue delays, cancelled sales and/or costly, though often invisible, reputational damage because their customers experience serious problems immediately following the sale. These problems typically involve customer-facing activities such as:
Often the issues arise because the company has focused mainly on minimizing its costs and has not carefully thought about how to manage the resulting impact on the paying customer. This white paper gives several examples of this issue and describes how we helped our clients understand the full cost of customers’ bad post-sales experiences and improve their profitability by suitably redesigning these customer-facing processes.
The white paper “More Revenue for Less Cost,” shows how to identify which parts of the sales and marketing organization are efficiently winning sales and which ones are “sandbagging it” i.e. using more resources to achieve lesser results. It also recommends several approaches for re-allocating resources to maximize revenue, thus delivering on the promise of achieving more revenue for less cost.
Does your organization have business processes that get in the way of revenue generation? A series of recent client projects has shown that companies often develop business processes in functions in and around the sales team that keep sales reps from being as effective as they can and should be. In this white paper we explore examples of such processes and recommend ways to streamline them to enable sales reps to spend more time selling and less time dealing with extraneous issues.
In this white paper we discuss how to help your sales reps prioritize their efforts onto their best sales prospects so that they can optimize their sales results. While sales reps will swear up and down that they know all there is to know about their territories, we often find that they are missing some of their biggest revenue opportunities. The core idea of this white paper is to tie internal corporate data on current accounts with external information on the broader market for your products to determine which accounts have the greatest sales potential.
In this white paper we describe a thought process that enables CEOs to act decisively on limited information about a strategic problem and yet have the confidence in the expected results that can never come from merely "shooting from the hip." This process, which we call Facts for Action™, quickly identifies the facts needed to drive a portfolio of competitive actions. We arrive at the facts themselves using small sample research and corroborate them from multiple sources.
A number of companies such as Siebel Software and Cisco Systems have been celebrated in the press for seeing the start of the downturn before their competitors. But, anticipating the impact of the economic downturn and reacting early to control discretionary spending are not enough to enable a company to capitalize on the downturn. To gain market share and improve your company's competitive position, your organization also needs to know early on when to adopt a more aggressive posture, so that it can be winning new business as customers begin to reopen their wallets. Such a strategy will enable your company to increase its share of the most profitable segments of the market, while the competition is still wondering if the worst is past. This paper explores how to design a good early alert system for your company.
During leaner economic times, strong companies can capitalize on competitors’ weaknesses to gain significant marketplace advantage. As a result, such companies can enter the next up-cycle in the economy much stronger than the rest of their industry and earn materially larger profits. In this paper I examine several strategies to achieve these goals.
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