SELLING THROUGH SOMEONE ELSEExecutive Summary

As Accenture has worked with organizations of various sizes and across industries to improve their growth and operational performance, one tenet has become abundantly clear to us: The selling (getting it sold) and service (keeping it sold) agenda for most companies is increasingly complex and, as such, generating sustained, profitable growth is a massive challenge for virtually every organization—large and small, in all regions of the world.

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Agile selling is the model of choice among the leaders in industries that have the most complex distribution channels and that thrive even with a highly independent partner network.

This is an executive summary of the book How to Sell Through Someone Else, published by John Wiley and Sons, February 2013.

With sales models that have experienced, at best, incremental change in the past several decades (despite sweeping changes in technology and customer behaviors), it is not hard to imagine why companies can’t keep up. Yet there are organizations that are succeeding in navigating their way through the complex web of vendors, competitors, service providers, distributors, resellers, and customers that play a part in their ultimate growth. Many of these organizations share a common trait: They have proactively and strategically adapted their sales models. They have embraced what we call “agile selling” models that are based, at least in part, on selling through someone else—i.e., a broader mix of intermediaries, other channel partners, and even customers that extend companies’ reach and growth. Agile selling is the model of choice among the leaders in industries that have the most complex distribution channels and that thrive even with a highly independent partner network. Other companies have much to learn from these leaders’ experiences.

In studying and working with companies around the world, we’ve identified the layers of “baggage” built up in sales operations that would become obvious, and could be corrected, if each step in the process acted as if they had to earn the right to serve their downstream business partner. Think about it: If you didn’t own your sales force, how much more important would it be to optimize every step of your incentive compensation, your lead generation, your pricing, or your talent management? If every function and person in your organization had to justify—and continually improve—their performance to keep providing their services to you, how might that affect the performance of your overall sales organization? The path to selling through someone else is

not a general theory; rather, it’s a model based upon the leading practices—and the deepest, richest capabilities—gleaned from the companies that deal with the greatest market and channel complexity, face ongoing and heightened market volatility, and often operate with the tightest margins: Those that sell through someone else.

The time is right—and the need is imminent—to realign, redefine and refocus the selling model and fundamentally transform the principles that guide it. That’s why we’ve written Selling Through Someone Else.

Anyone who shares some responsibility for driving profitable growth in their organization—whether the CEO, head of sales, CIO, head of human resources or maybe all of those as a small or medium-sized business owner—can benefit from this book. The insights provided can be a valuable guide as you consider how to better position your sales organization and partners to capitalize on the abundant growth opportunities before you.

This book is different from most selling theory or methodology books on the market. As noted above, it can benefit the entire C-suite, not just the Chief Sales Officer (CSO). It’s based on Accenture’s collective experience working with companies all over the world to dramatically transform their selling model, and it gets very specific about which elements of the sales model need updating and which specific areas you can change to infuse new growth and profitability. The book also brings in guidance from

numerous other Accenture specialists with deep knowledge and experience in each of the underlying capabilities required to support the new agile selling model. And it shares the specific experiences of leading companies that have transformed the way they sell and the way they support their selling ecosystem.

Within the book we explore why companies shall embrace the elements of an agile selling model that makes greater use of sales resources not employed or owned by the sales function. We also describe what the agile selling model looks like in practice, drawing on the experiences of companies in four industries that already rely heavily on the agile selling model—consumer goods manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, insurance and electronics and high tech—and highlighting what other companies can learn from leaders in those industries.

We dig deep into the core capabilities companies need within their organization to bring the agile selling model to life—including lead generation, incentives, pricing, and analytics. We describe in detail what it takes to “build a better network” that extends far outside the walls of the organization and capitalizes on new market opportunities, and explore the core infrastructure needed to sustain the relationships with customers, channel partners and other entities that are critical to agile selling. Finally, we devote considerable attention to the dimension that’s arguably most critical to the success of the agile selling model: people.

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THE RISING IMPACT OF SALES AND DISTRIBUTION: WHY “GOOD ENOUGH” ISN’T ENOUGH ANYMORE

The amount of change the world has undergone in the past 10 years is truly astounding. The Internet has moved to the center of life and commerce for people all over the world, serving as the main platform on which we entertain and educate ourselves, purchase goods and services, and stay in touch with friends, family and companies with which we do business. Increasingly powerful, pervasive and connected mobile devices are providing access to the Internet’s content as never before while redefining the computing model—and, in the process, dramatically altering how and when customers buy. And the market for companies’ offerings truly has become global, with emerging markets now taking center stage as not only the loci of growth but also the source of innovations that are making their way back to developed markets.

Of course, these momentous developments also have wreaked havoc with most companies’ growth plans. Organizations used to the status quo have had a difficult time keeping up with the pace of change in the markets they serve. Most are struggling to fully understand these shifts, determine the implications for their business, and make the changes to their organizations to help enable them to compete effectively in today’s world. One of their biggest obstacles to change is the sales models they have relied on for far too long. These models—the private sales force, franchise distribution partners, and independent distribution partners—may have served sales organizations well in the past. However, are all inherently flawed in one or more ways and not up to the challenge of delivering what sales needs to be

effective today. In fact, it’s clear that given today’s dramatic environmental changes, “business as usual” will likely result in sales teams that will be either too slow, too poorly armed, in the wrong place (or all of the above) to compete in each changing market.

As we’ve studied and worked with a vast array of B2B companies around the world, we’ve recognized there are organizations already on the leading edge of employing new approaches to selling that are helping them address today’s market challenges. These approaches are all emblematic of a selling model that we believe will be instrumental in defining the winners from the losers in the coming years. This new agile selling model incorporates the most important and effective elements from the franchise and fully independent sales models long employed by leading companies in the consumer goods manufacturing, pharmaceutical, high-tech and insurance industries.

Indeed, for years, the companies in the aforementioned industries have had to build and sustain high-value relationships with channel partners outside of their own sales forces—whether it be retailers and distributors for consumer goods companies, physicians for pharmaceutical firms, agents for insurance companies, and integrators and resellers for high-tech organizations. In fact, these companies’ very success has largely hinged on how well they can identify the appropriate channel partners to go to market with and through relationships; create beneficial relationships with those companies; and deploy the optimal processes, systems and other resources to help affiliated companies sell successfully.

The experiences of these industries illustrate how agile selling can provide the flexibility, accountability and responsiveness necessary to capitalize on growth opportunities in today’s new economic environment. Making greater use of the agile selling model can help companies:

•Increase sales: Via a wider and deeper network of selling partners by becoming their “partner of choice”.

•Increase profitability: Leads are converted at higher rates via channel optimization.

•Increase reach: Access closed markets by engaging channel partners with established relationships.

•Increase accuracy and insights: Channel partners trust and share critical sales and planning information because it is in their best interests to do so. In the process, their insights become yours.

•Improve individual sales performance: Using better tools, training, and execution that is analytically based and technology-powered via mobility, the cloud and digital waves.

•Reduce sales operations costs: Value-added steps are taken better and faster, while wasted steps are eliminated.

•Reduce complexity: Increased network complexity (where it adds value) is offset by widespread decreases in operating and technology complexity that slows response and overall sales cycle time.

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While the blueprint for agile selling includes many of the traditional processes and activities that CSOs have managed for decades, it requires companies to operate at dramatically different execution speeds, and different levels of collaboration. Unquestionably, the sales processes we all understand—sales strategy, sales management, sales execution, sales operations and sales talent management—still hold, but the characteristics that define leading practice in have changed, in some cases radically.

For instance, in agile selling, the traditional sales strategies that focused on defining finite routes to market and robust rules of engagement are replaced by a comprehensive strategy and continuous monitoring, evaluation and refinement of that strategy. Leading-edge strategies include letting the ecosystem define new value chains, push the collaboration boundaries further and make them more dynamic.

In sales management, companies have spent significant resources building processes based on a regular review cadence, but they have always focused on the data available to them directly versus integrating the data available through the other nodes they work with to go to market. In an agile selling model, companies should manage their pipeline jointly with their ecosystem players, proactively work account relationships and generate opportunities based on all data available from the nodes, and use analytics to draw predictive insights from available data. Companies can no longer efficiently go to market by only rationalizing their own sales process. Instead, companies need to define joint opportunity management

and manage to a joint pipeline. In essence, while companies have increasingly sold through someone else, and interacted with more nodes in their ecosystem, their sales management process has not evolved.

From a sales execution standpoint, emerging leaders in agile selling seek to define sales execution motions together with their ecosystem and leveraging cloud technology to accelerate enablement of advanced collaboration. They are identifying and prioritizing the inventory of selling scenarios and focusing on enabling those that demonstrate a tangible impact and accelerate adoption within the ecosystem. This is a pragmatic way to avoid boiling the ocean, and companies are more frequently driving these changes via iterative deployment of cloud applications.

Operationally, agile selling leaders continue to push collaborative boundaries by looking at jointly building sales capabilities and in some cases creating dedicated joint operations teams. And to get all of this done, leaders are taking a more analytical and attribute-based approach to sales talent recruiting and development—including talent beyond “owned”

employees—to identify competencies, time and activity, and personality traits of their best-performing sellers and translating those into key target behaviors and competencies that enable sellers to succeed in a particular company’s environment.

Finally, an agile selling model requires developing a new sales strategy. In an agile selling environment, CSOs have an opportunity to be the conductor of a “symphony” that is played across the ecosystem. Just as a conductor helps the various instruments in the symphony play in rhythm and harmony to entertain the audience, the CSO can articulate how the various functions of the organization and its channel partners work together to execute the company’s go-to-market plan to delight the customer. And just as the conductor relies on his or her baton to direct to the orchestra’s musicians, the CSO must have a powerful sales strategy that articulates the company’s intentions and guides the actions of all the ecosystem players—both inside and outside the organization—to create and deliver a customer experience that meets customers’ expectations.

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Of course, making the agile selling model work requires companies to adopt a vast array of new capabilities. As they do so, companies likely will encounter an array of challenges and issues they must address. Some areas of the organization may have already well-developed processes in place and leaders who firmly believe in what they’ve been doing to date (both of which will be hard to change). Other areas may not have been touched in years, or decades, and are ripe for a refresh (but aren’t a priority for the team). Still others may be attempting to take advantage of major changes in markets and technology, but may lack skills and/or infrastructure in house to succeed in those initiatives. In short, there are a myriad of key areas that companies must address to move toward agile selling.

For instance, in the agile selling ecosystem where a B2B company’s sales and service lifecycle is no longer a linear process, but rather a multi-directional network, how does the company identify, prioritize, contact, manage and convert sales leads? In our experience, the answer involves a demand-generation approach that relies on advanced analytics to target the appropriate accounts and prioritize leads, is supported by a sophisticated lead routing and nurturing capability and processes that are tightly aligned across all channels, and is paired with a mechanism that enables the company to closely track and measure the results of all leads.

To generate leads more effectively, companies need a tighter focus on the customer buying experience. Indeed, while specific offerings are still the lifeblood of companies, in today’s more sophisticated selling ecosystem the most powerful competitive differentiator is how well

a company can create and deliver an experience that matches to customers’ specific needs and preferences. To create such an experience, companies should begin by rethinking the selling process using self-service as a reference point, and creating a new, pull-oriented selling process that is designed around the customer using insights driven by analytics.

Incentives and pricing also are vital today, just as they always have been. However, the complexities of an agile selling model require companies to approach these core capabilities in different ways. For example, companies have always had difficulty truly understanding how well incentives work. In a scenario with more complex selling relationships, determining the return on investment (ROI) from incentives is even harder. Organizations that get the best return on incentives make sure they align incentive programs around their go-to-market model and customer experience blueprint, manage and measure incentive spending as an integrated portfolio at multiple levels, and use advanced analytics to design, test and dynamically manage incentive programs.

It’s the same situation for pricing. Setting the right price to maximize volume and profit has always been a difficult proposition, and it’s one that gets even harder the more—and more independent—sales channels a company employs. For these companies, seeking to achieve

“channel harmony,” not cross-channel pricing party, is the name of the game. To achieve such harmony, a company should execute pricing effectively—which, in turn, requires a company to be able to segment both its customer and channel base; set the pricing strategy for each channel focused on a particular customer segment; and negotiate with profit as well as revenue in mind. Technology tools (especially analytics) and data, appropriate rewards, relevant metrics, and strong governance are enablers that are critical to building a strong pricing capability that is appropriate for a multichannel environment.

One key theme running through the aforementioned capabilities is analytics. Indeed, in our experience, creating and operating an effective and sophisticated agile selling model is impossible without the use of modern analytics tools. But analytics also can play a much broader role in significantly improving a company’s performance at every step of the sales cycle. Leading companies are using powerful new analytics tools to complement their sales people’s intuition, judgment and experience, and help them to make more effective, fact-based decisions. By thus injecting science into selling, companies can exert greater influence on those in the sales process who matter most, evolve from segmented to personalized selling, and get an earlier and more accurate read on sales performance.

THE NEW AGILE SELLING MODEL AND STRATEGY

The most powerful competitive differentiator is how well a company can create and deliver an experience that matches to customers’ specific needs and preferences.

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When designing, building and using the preceding capabilities, organizations must consider the existing skills and requirements of not simply their direct resources, or even the indirect resources, but of all parties engaged in the agile selling ecosystem. This goes beyond design and implementation to how these capabilities are governed and where they “sit” in the organization’s management structure and system. Importantly, governance structures must be defined by how well they support the successful operation of the entire ecosystem, not simply a company’s owned resources; therefore, tighter integration and relationships with all the other resources or stakeholders is required.

This is especially true of what we call the joint initiative (JI) model. A JI is a transformation of a traditional go-to-market relationship, whereby two or more companies jointly invest to develop differentiated solutions that they bring to market together. A JI is a new entity with dedicated sales and service teams and integrated operations that pursue aligned business objectives of the two or more participating companies. The most successful JIs eventually evolve into a standalone line of business for the respective parties which, through highly strategic teaming, can generate multiples of the revenue that the traditional go-to-market arrangement does.

In essence, a JI is like a small company. It has a formal organization structure—that includes leadership and governance, offering development, go-to-market capabilities, delivery workforce, and program management—as well as explicitly

defined roles and duties. Parties investing in JIs intend to leverage each other’s strengths, such as better access to new sales channels, technology superiority and functional experience.

The JI model and others like it can be especially helpful to companies looking to penetrate two markets that are rife with complexity and uncertainty: The small and medium-sized business (SMB) market and markets outside of their established, familiar territories.

The vast number of SMBs, their diverse needs, and the unique buying behaviors of different businesses are all factors that combine to produce an enormously complex test of a B2B company looking to capitalize on growth opportunities in the SMB market. Getting the offerings right, the channel coverage right, and the sales and marketing programs right can be enormously difficult. Among the keys to doing so is a foundation built on segmentation and predictive modeling that can help a company develop offerings tailored to SMB prospects’ needs, as well as a multichannel SMB customer engagement model that incorporates direct sales, channel partners, inside sales, indirect channels, teleweb, and other approaches.

When looking to expand globally, it doesn’t matter if a company is going from a developed market to emerging markets, or vice versa. Both can be helped immensely by gaining local insight and more sophisticated capabilities via alliances or relationships with firms already established in those markets—rather than taking the costly, time-consuming and potentially risky route of creating capabilities from

scratch. Companies from developed markets looking to expand into emerging ones can learn from other companies that have successfully identified partners that helped them adapt their offers and capabilities to local needs, tastes and cultures. Conversely, companies based in emerging markets seeking to expand into developed markets should identify partners that can bring sophisticated capabilities that can help them quickly broaden their reach.

In pursuing the SMB and global markets, companies also can find social media to be a critical enabler. Social media tools and logic are important enablers of agile selling, as they can help B2B companies overcome many of their current sales organization limitations—most notably, functional silos and outdated technologies that impede teaming and information sharing. By drawing on the networking capabilities of social media platforms—such as Tibbr, Yammer, Jive Software, Socialcast or Chatter—sales organizations can build cross-functional internal communities of expertise that spark new levels of collaboration and information sharing and can dramatically improve sales force productivity. They can more easily attract a new generation of technically savvy and socially networked employees. And they can strengthen (or, in some cases, build) solution-based business capabilities that their customers now demand. By using such so-called “social sales” capabilities, companies can produce, share and use the right knowledge at the right time, as well as deliver highly specialized, comprehensive solutions that their customers crave.

BUILDING THE BETTER NETWORK— POSITIONING FOR SUCCESS AND EFFECTIVENESS

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Social media tools and logic are important enablers of Agile Selling.

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The CSO and CIO should determine together how the sales technology infrastructure and supporting applications should evolve over time as business needs change.

To support the core capabilities of agile selling—and sustain the critical relationships with customers, channel partners and other entities that are critical to agile selling— a company requires a robust and highly flexible infrastructure that can sustain the critical relationships with customers, channel partners and other entities. Creating such an infrastructure requires the intelligent use of a new breed of technologies, as well as a new partnership between the CIO and chief sales information officer (CSIO) and an evolution of the traditional IT operating model.

Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that many of the things that are disrupting companies’ sales efforts and pursuit of profitable growth are also the “cure”—especially mobile technologies and cloud computing. More than any other tools, mobile and cloud solutions hold massive promise for helping companies create the agile selling organization—one that can rapidly respond to new market demands, quickly drive new products through the R&D pipeline, share information to interact with customers and partners in real time, and satisfy customers’ unique needs. Mobile and cloud solutions are fueling the development of highly flexible and collaborative business processes that are ideal for today’s new selling ecosystem.

From a mobility perspective, there’s been an explosion of mobile device use among sales forces, and for good reason. Mobile devices help enable sales people to inject speed, responsiveness and easier access to vital information into the sales cycle, with the end result being more deals closed, more quickly. However, in most organizations, sales people are making their own decisions about which technologies to use and how and when to use them, which opens the door to a whole

host of potential problems—consistency, standardization, optimization, and security—for the larger enterprise. These challenges are especially problematic when a company sells through multiple channels. Thus, it’s critical for IT organizations to help build more-strategic and standardized mobility-technology programs and strategies without exerting so much control and restrictions that it compromises their effectiveness.

The cloud also offers massive potential for helping companies adopt more agile processes. Cloud solutions help companies to test and try new technologies that improve demand-generation without having to make huge bets in terms of technology investments. However, cloud-based agile processes and systems must be designed and developed the right way or they could result in an inflexibility that prevents the experimentation and speed they offer. In Accenture’s experience, there are two dimensions to consider when determining the appropriate approach. The first dimension is “business penetration,” an assessment of how much sales, channel partners and other customer-facing entities and activities need to change to accommodate the technologies. The second dimension to consider is “process intensity,” an assessment of how much business processes are impacted by the new application. By bringing these two dimensions together, companies can determine whether they want to take a “plug and play,” trial, proof of value or iterative transformation approach to implementation.

Of course, the IT organization plays a critical role in the development of the flexible and collaborative business processes—and in the selection and implementation of key supporting technologies and infrastructure—

that are core to agile selling. That’s why, as they move forward, companies must confirm that the sales and IT organizations are on the same page. Without tight coordination between the two, technology can fall far short of helping the sales organization—both internal and external—respond as quickly and nimbly as the market demands. In fact, both the CSO and CIO should be intimately involved across all segments of the sales organization and agree on how the sales technology infrastructure and supporting applications should evolve over time as business needs change.

Critical to forging and sustaining such a relationship between the CIO and CSO is a new IT operating model that can respond more quickly to changes in the marketplace and business agenda—and, in some cases, actually lead business innovation instead of following. For instance, the IT sourcing model should incorporate an increasing array of in-house and third-party solutions as businesses embrace the cloud and other emerging technologies. Additionally, the IT workforce must adopt new skills—ranging from technical expertise to relationship building—to support the new model. And, to effectively manage competing requests for support, CIOs would need disciplined governance policies to establish priorities for innovation and address the needs of both internal and external stakeholders.

In the end, the key for companies is to remember that an evolution to agile selling is not about any single project. It is about fundamentally changing the way that business and IT work together and are organized, as well as the basis for how decisions get made and work gets done.

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BEYOND THE “PILOT” PHASE: THE CORE COMPONENTS OF THE AGILE SELLING ENTERPRISE—POSITIONING FOR EFFICIENCY

Arguably, the dimension that is most critical to the success of the agile selling model is people.

For years, sales leaders have faced serious challenges when it comes to the sales workforce. They have trouble finding the right people, keeping them when they do, helping them build the right skills, and improving their performance. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say most sales leaders have a severe talent crisis—which is not an attractive scenario when the pressure is on to continually beat last quarter’s numbers.

And it doesn’t get any easier when selling through a new model that introduces more and more complex sales relationships and a whole new set of talent challenges companies must conquer. In an agile selling model, companies expect sales reps to network, collaborate, influence and sell in a world that is complicated, indirect, and often ambiguous. Sales executives can no longer increase sales by simply adding new reps. Gone are the days when a rep can sit at his kitchen table the night before a big call and pull together what he needs to have a successful customer visit the next day. Reps need input from multiple points within their organization, forcing them to navigate their own complex organization. Data is flying everywhere. Products are short-lived and constantly evolving. Influence on their customers comes from other customers, peers, other vendors, competitors, third parties, the Internet and myriad other sources. The challenge to build a high-performance sales team is hard and it’s getting harder.

Creating an effective sales workforce for the new agile selling ecosystem involves building talent strategies, competencies, learning models, and analytics capabilities to create agility, speed, and stronger integration inside and outside the organization. We have found that leaders in this regard focus their efforts on five foundational areas.

Talent strategySaid simply, performance leaders know what good looks like: They have profiles of high-performing sellers and sales managers, as well as straightforward strategies and tactics for their sales operations organization and channel operations. Their talent strategy isn’t built on anecdotes and “conventional wisdom” but, rather, on analytical insights.

Operating environmentPerformance leaders align increasingly complex operations to make it easy for sellers to navigate, maximize customer interaction value, and minimize low-value administrative burden.

AnalyticsPerformance leaders build a strong analytics capability that gets information where it is needed when it is needed most and derives insights from data that inform strategy and future decision making. They help enable their staff to gain access to data and deep analytical understanding of the market trends, and they push this analytical capability deep into their organizations—not just through a distinct group of market researchers.

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EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES FOR SELLING SUCCESS

Creating an effective sales workforce for the new agile selling ecosystem involves building talent strategies, competencies, learning models, and analytics capabilities to create agility, speed, and stronger integration inside and outside the organization.

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Network, collaborate and learnPerformance leaders build up the skills of the sales organization to effectively and efficiently use insights to differentiate each and every customer interaction, from face-to-face meetings to tweets to even partner interactions where the company itself isn’t present.

Sales managementPerformance leaders build a sales management capability to orchestrate their team performance, navigate complex deal shaping, create a positive working environment that retains the best sellers, and coach sellers into high performance. This world is very different than merely pushing sellers to barely exceed quotas.

Re-building the talent model across these five building blocks can require extensive effort and change. In our experience, companies can benefit from implementing a step-wise, coordinated approach aimed at creating real behavioral change across channels operations, sales operations, and the field sales organization. Doing so involves not only defining the precise target behaviors for sellers that will drive a customer experience that is unique for your company, but also determining the data and information governance that enables the right information to be presented at the right time to the right place. It involves building deep analytic capabilities that can generate insights sellers can easily consume and translate into meaningful customer interactions, as well as developing the appropriate selling competencies in both “owned” and teaming partner sales forces.

And, perhaps most importantly, it involves defining and segmenting performance management system and compensation models to encourage the target behaviors that are most critical to achieving a differentiated customer experience and attaining business objectives.

Companies that build new competencies, embrace analytics, develop new approaches to learning and information sharing, and increase collaboration with channel partners and customers, will be better positioned to excel in the current agile selling environment. They will also create a productive and fulfilling environment for their sales teams that can help them retain their best sales talent.

There’s no doubt the world has become an increasingly difficult place in which to do business. Sales leaders, in particular, face many challenges as they seek ways for their company to generate sustainable, profitable growth. For most companies, the answer is an obvious, albeit it far from simple, one: They should make a substantial change in the way they sell and go to market.

Based on our experience, that means adopting elements of what has proven to be a more efficient and effective sales model, one that’s much better suited to the complexity and volatility of today’s economic environment. That is the agile selling model.

We’re not saying that every company necessarily has to fully embrace agile selling. To the contrary, such a complete and dramatic shift may not be the right one for every company and, in fact, may be impossible to make. What we are saying is that every company can benefit from taking steps toward that model or, at the very least, adopting some of the practices that companies excelling in the use of the agile selling model employ.

Companies who are successful at agile selling are adept at applying analytics to understand the effectiveness of specific channels and routes to market, and to confirm that each step and collaborator in the sales process contributes materially to ROI. They give channel partners access to what they need—tools, data, training and insights—thus incentivizing those partners to profitably sell the company’s products instead of its competitors’ products. They excel in creating compelling online experiences and involving intermediaries and customers in the selling process. And they create “dynamic ecosystems,” continuously looking for ways to redefine channel boundaries and develop new relationships.

Of course, a shift toward the agile selling model will necessarily challenge a company’s incumbent position every step of the way. And in today’s environment, companies should welcome such a conversation, as it will illuminate where they have opportunities to substantially improve their sales effectiveness and, ultimately, their ability to compete and thrive in their chosen markets.

CONCLUSION

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About AccentureAccenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with approximately 259,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Combining unparalleled experience, comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, and extensive research on the world’s most successful companies, Accenture collaborates with clients to help them become high-performance businesses and governments. The company generated net revenues of US$27.9 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2012. Its home page is www.accenture.com.

About Accenture Sales & Customer ServicesSales & Customer Services helps companies acquire, develop and retain more profitable customer relationships. We offer a broad range of innovative capabilities that address every aspect of the customer experience, including pricing strategy and profitability assessment, customer analytics, direct and indirect sales force execution, customer service, field support, customer contact operations, and retail/branch operations. We use these combinations of skills to help our clients accelerate growth, improve sales productivity and reduce customer-care costs—helping increase the value of their customer relationships and enhancing the economic value of their brands.

Copyright © 2013 Accenture All rights reserved.

Accenture, its logo, and High Performance Delivered are trademarks of Accenture.

Contact usTo learn more about how Accenture can help your organization develop agile selling capabilities, please visit accenture.com/managementconsulting or contact one of our managing directors:

Robert Wollan robert.e.wollan@accenture.com

Naveen Jain naveen.k.jain@accenture.com

Mike Heald michael.a.heald@accenture.com