Revamping Sales for Sustainable Growth

Industrial Sales: A Growing Challenge

Industrial firms today contend with intensified competition, consolidated customer bases, and increasingly sophisticated procurement departments. Many sales teams find themselves struggling to keep pace and must transform to remain competitive and drive profitable growth.

The sales environment has become more intricate, characterized by longer lead times, multiple decision-makers, and heightened bidding competition. In short, selling has never been more demanding.

To make matters more complex, procurement teams have evolved far more quickly than their sales counterparts—creating a capability gap that puts additional strain on sales organizations.

This shifting landscape signals a clear imperative: industrial companies must strategically invest in their sales functions. According to Bespoke Business Development’s B2B Sales Study, top-performing “All Star” companies—those achieving strong growth and profitability—dedicate as much as 35% of their revenue to sales, compared to only 15–20% among peers.

This guide outlines how leaders can elevate their sales organizations to thrive in the new industrial marketplace.

1. Sharpening the Sales Funnel: Enhancing Effectiveness

Qualifying Opportunities with Precision

Improving how opportunities are qualified ensures sales teams prioritize high-value prospects. This involves identifying the customer type and deal structure early—whether it’s a standard transaction or a formal tender requiring broader team involvement. AI-powered tools can support this effort by quickly classifying and prioritizing leads.

Structured Account Planning

Many companies lack detailed, strategic account plans. A disciplined approach includes analyzing account history, understanding client needs, mapping key stakeholders, and defining growth targets. Coordinated action plans—aligned across sales, marketing, and customer success—help build and expand long-term relationships. Regular reviews ensure strategies adapt to evolving market demands.

Aligning Internal Capabilities

Sales performance improves when internal processes and roles are aligned with strategic goals. Forming deal-specific teams and establishing expert negotiation groups can enhance responsiveness and effectiveness. Coordination between sales, product, marketing, and pricing teams ensures a seamless customer experience and strengthens value communication.

2. Accelerating Digital Sales Transformation

Despite advancements in digital purchasing, many organizations lag behind in modernizing their sales processes. AI and automation present powerful tools for transforming the commercial experience across three fronts:

Optimizing Go-To-Market Channels

AI-enhanced omnichannel platforms can personalize experiences, offer intelligent product suggestions, and adjust pricing in real time. Self-service product configuration tools empower customers to make informed purchasing decisions with minimal friction, improving conversion rates.

Enhancing Sales Operations

Sales efficiency can be boosted through AI-based tools that generate real-time, data-driven quotes and improve CRM systems with predictive analytics and lead scoring. This allows sales professionals to focus their energy on strategic, high-value tasks.

Improving Sales Performance

AI offers deeper insights into customer behavior and account value. Lifetime value predictions and intelligent cross-sell/upsell suggestions help teams focus on the right opportunities at the right time—boosting revenue per customer and building stronger relationships.

Digital transformation isn’t limited to a single aspect—it supports the full sales cycle. A well-integrated digital sales strategy empowers teams with actionable insights, leading to smarter decisions and accelerated growth.

3. Redesigning the Sales Organization: Boosting Customer Engagement

Refining Market Focus and Product Alignment

For manufacturers, deeply understanding how a product serves different customer needs is critical. Unlike service firms, manufacturers can’t easily adapt products after production. Success begins with clearly defined target markets, mapped product requirements, and strong collaboration between sales and product teams—supported by category or product managers when necessary.

Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities

Instead of defaulting to traditional roles (e.g., technical sales or business development), organizations should define responsibilities based on desired outcomes. This helps avoid vertical overlap (multiple teams performing the same function) and horizontal overlap (teams confusing customers with duplicate outreach).

A practical approach is to have each team member clearly state their primary goal and supporting objectives. Comparing these statements helps uncover misalignments and clarify ownership.

Optimizing Sales Processes

With well-defined roles, organizations can streamline sales processes. In standardized sales environments, this means integrated tools, clear communication channels, and transparent lead tracking—reducing unnecessary steps and bureaucracy.

In more bespoke, project-based sales settings, flexibility is key. Rather than rigid process checkpoints, organizations should define milestone-based systems and promote regular informal collaboration to keep teams aligned.

Investing in Skills Development

Although systems and structures matter, sales is still a people-centered function. As procurement teams become more data-driven, sales professionals must also build analytical capabilities. Empowering sales teams with training in data interpretation, pricing analytics, and value-based negotiation is essential to compete effectively.

Turning Strategy into Action

The disparity between procurement and sales performance continues to widen. Relying on strong products and past relationships is no longer enough. To unlock growth, a bold investment in sales transformation is required.

Leading organizations—those labeled as “All Stars”—are already reengineering their sales processes and seeing measurable results. These changes deliver both improved profitability and sustained competitiveness.

Now is the time to evaluate your sales organization, identify areas for transformation, and implement a step-by-step plan to build a future-proof, growth-oriented sales engine.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Bespoke Business Development. They are intended to encourage discussion and reflection, rather than serve as legal, financial, accounting, tax, or professional advice.