From engagement to alignment

As they grapple with everything from multichannel marketing to customer analytics, B2B companies need to engage customers at levels unheard of just a few years ago—which can have a profound effect on corporate go-to-market strategy.

This means companies are taking different approaches to how they view and prioritize customers, as well as different approaches to their market-facing organization. They must change how they plan and manage sales performance. Operational sales planning is no longer an annual event each fiscal year—it demands constant revision.

The ability to create and manage sales territories is critical to managing sales performance. Doing so confers companies a competitive advantage, as they can quickly move customers, refine territories, modify product lineups and reassign personnel—this helps maximize market coverage and make the most out of sales resources.

New strategy, old systems

With 11,500 employees and more than 5,000 vehicles, Purolator is Canada’s leading integrated freight and parcel solutions provider, handling 320 million pieces through pickup and delivery, and 108 million pounds of freight annually.

Several years ago, Purolator decided that it wanted to improve its market position through expansion of its sales organization, and transformation of its go-to-market strategy. It wanted to deepen its sales relationships with customers to help combat competition, according to Marcel Gijbels, manager, sales systems, for Purolator.

However, Purolator’s territory management systems couldn’t handle the changes needed for the level of customer engagement it desired, and could not align customers with incentive compensation, territories and goals.

The system couldn’t move accounts between channels (such as inside versus field sales), define team-selling dynamics or make the many small changes required to implement a new go-to-market strategy.

“We were expanding our sales organization, but our legacy system couldn’t do what we needed,” Gijbels says.

JAVELIN® Alignment Manager

ZS implemented its JAVELIN Alignment Manager solution to help Purolator create a dynamic territory alignment process as it updated its go-to-market strategy.

In addition to giving Purolator a baseline alignment solution, JAVELIN Alignment Manager:

• Allowed the sales team to govern the process through managing ongoing changes
• Gave field managers the ability to make dynamic alignment modifications
• Integrated with enterprise resource planning, CRM and the incentive compensation management system
  

Faster, better, smarter territory alignment

JAVELIN Alignment Manager meant Purolator did not have to rely upon outside companies for benefits that its legacy system could not deliver, including:

• The ability to make multiple alignment changes in minutes instead of a full day
  
• Greater efficiency, as mapped-out alignment changes reduced the time needed for corrections
  
• Compensation system changes take minimal time and effort instead of two to six weeks

“We couldn’t make such changes without significant cost, but now we can make changes quickly,” Gijbels says. “JAVELIN Alignment Manager is the heartbeat of the sales organization. It controls customer alignment, which ultimately, influences everything else.”