Making Cross-Silo Sales Work

Making Cross-Silo Sales Work:from The Sales Challenger™ by Lucia Litman
Growing sales complexity requires business units and functions to often work together to fulfill customer needs. That said, few companies have an established process for cross-silo deal consideration that prioritizes company interests over those of a single silo. With so many parties involved, it is easy to exhaust resources on deals that lack potential, while letting good deals slip through the cracks.
In many organizations, the challenge stems much deeper—non-Sales silos lack customer focus and de-emphasize customer-need fulfillment, thereby limiting profit growth opportunities.
How then do the best companies drive cross-silo collaboration and commitment on deal requirements?
Our search led us to Alcatel, a global telecommunications company, which uses standardized decision templates to secure enterprise-wide commitment to execute on deal requirements. Using a tiered approach, Alcatel was able to involve all relevant stakeholders in the decision, while ensuring the best interests of the larger enterprise as the deciding factor in approving deals.
Alcatel uses the following three-step process to engage business units:

1. Sales Prequalification: Reps use a standardized scorecard to assess individual opportunities from an enterprise-wide perspective. The scorecard forces reps to think beyond simply driving sales volume to anticipating and evaluating potential deal complications.
2. Business Unit Assessment: Opportunities shortlisted by reps are sent to business units to perform due diligence.  By evaluating a deal on multiple levels, Alcatel provides an opportunity to resolve conflicts that arise if a deal benefits one BU, but adversely affects another.
3. Enterprise-Wide View: Business units’ assessment of the deal’s viability is aggregated to arrive at an enterprise-level perspective necessary to make a go/no-go decision. When business units are unable to agree on an opportunity, the deal is escalated to a group of C-level executives.

The formalization of the approval process allowed Alcatel to not only improve its efficiency, but also its effectiveness. By agreeing to deals on the front-end, Alcatel’s business units are better able to focus on the execution of deals that are in the best interests of the enterprise as a whole.
SEC Members, to learn more, review Alcatel’s best practice on Solutions Commitment Templates.