sensitive information like costs. Smart sales organisations are redesigning their processes to actively encourage customer verification rather than fearing it. It may be counterintuitive, but it works. 5 . Win the backend battle. One of the key challenges that sales leaders face is that increased price transparency is compressing frontend margins across a wide range of industries. Data published in the paper The future of buyer-seller interactions shows that the real profit opportunities increasingly lie in backend revenue streams such as services, maintenance, and product add-ons. Crucially, your success in capturing this backend value relies heavily on the trust you build during the initial sale. This has significant implications for how you structure and incentivise your sales operations. Stop compensating your sales teams based purely on frontend revenue and start rewarding them for creating backend value. The evidence is unequivocal: the old playbook is dead. Sales organisations that cling to traditional approaches based on information control and product- pushing are facing extinction. The winners in this new environment will be those who embrace transparency, reinvent their value proposition, and build their strategies around trust-based value creation. It is time to adapt or die.
engaging with sales teams. Four in every five customers go even further, only contacting salespeople once they have already shortlisted their options. What does this mean for sales leaders? Stop training your people to be walking brochures. Instead, start developing them as insight providers and complexity navigators. Your value doesn’t lie in telling customers what they can easily find using Google, it’s in helping them to make sense of the overwhelming information landscape they have to traverse in systems to your channels. The evidence is crystal clear: there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to managing multi-channel sales systems. Data collected by Christian Homburg, Arnd Vomberg, and Stephan Muehlhaeuser shows that formal rules and procedures enhance performance in indirect order to make a decision. 3 . Match your control
channels, where companies sell their products through distributors, wholesalers, or retailers. However, they actually damage performance in direct channels where companies deal with the end customers themselves. Similarly, centralised decision- making boosts direct channel performance but undermines indirect channel results. The lesson here is that sales leaders should stop implementing blanket governance approaches. Instead, they should start tailoring their control systems to your channel strategy. 4 . Leverage the power of verification. Here’s a fascinating finding: when customers can independently verify your claims, it doesn’t make you weaker. On the contrary, it makes you stronger. Research shows that verifiable claims build significantly more trust than unverifiable ones, even if those claims are about
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