McKinsey - Sales Growth: Five Proven Strategies from the World’s Sales Leaders

Improving sales performance with methods and tools is a must. A refreshing change beyond the common focus on back-office and operational excellence. This book is fact-based and takes a unique customer perspective. I have no doubt that the practical insights laid out here lead to sales growth.

Michel Crochon, Executive Vice-President, Schneider Electric

Sales Growth is sales wisdom condensed in a book. I have recommended this book to many of my sales executives who tell me its helped them look at the sales function with a fresh perspective.

Joydeep Mukherjee, CEO, HR Johnson

The new edition of Sales Growth sheds lights on presales, a critically important function in sales management, but one that is often overlooked.

William Hendrickx, former President EMEA, Alcatel Lucent

Sales Growth is an outstanding book, sharing deep insights into the processes embedded in great companies. It is a must read book for any company aspiring to outperform its industry. I have personally worked on the principles the book sets out, and seen them deliver exceptional results.

Vivek Agnihotri, Executive Director & CEO, Prism Cement

This book is a must-read for sales executives in emerging markets. The research and practical ideas clearly spell out how to create a global sales strategy with a local edge.

Ricardo Villela Marino, CEO, Ita Latin America; Board Member, Ita Unibanco

The authors perspectives on the future of sales management are intriguing and thought-provoking. This book is essential reading for senior sales executives.

Sunil Rayan, Director of Sales, Google

If timing is everything, then Sales Growth has it made. We are at an inflection point where massive changes in technology and customer behavior point to growth opportunities. This book provides a critical blueprint for bridging those opportunitiesboth those in the future and right in front of us.

Richard Kellam, former Chief Customer Officer, Mars

Thomas Baumgartner
Homayoun Hatami
Maria Valdivieso

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright 2016 by McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
The first edition of this book was published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in 2012.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

ISBN 9781119281085 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119281092 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119281061 (ePub)

Ive always wanted to start a company. I grew up watching my father build a chain of apparel stores, and I started my first business, Liberty Software, when I was 15. A friend and I wrote computer games (Crypt of the Undead was one of our first), my grandmother wrote the music, and we sold them to Atari. In college, I ran the company out of my dorm room; I studied entrepreneurship, and interned at Apple, where I wrote code for the Macintosh and became enamored with the Think Different mind-set that permeated the organization, from the revolutionary products the company built to the pirate flag flying on the roof. Early in life, I knew I wanted to create new products, encourage revolutionary ideas, and build a distinctive culture in my businesses.

So it came as a great surprise when, upon college graduation, my entrepreneurship professors told me not to start my own business but instead get real-world experience. Specifically, they urged me to take a sales position that focused on building relationships with customers. They called it carrying a bag.

I was less than enthusiastic. A career in sales wasnt anything close to the path I had envisioned for myself. Yet this turned out to be some of the best business guidance Ive ever received. It certainly changed my life and deeply influenced the company I ultimately did create.

After graduation I accepted a job at Oracle answering its 1-800-number. I didnt want to be a 1-800-number operator, but soon I discovered that working with the customer was a lot easier and a lot more fun than writing code. It also taught me the value that guides everything we do at Salesforce today: nothing is more important than customer success, and sales is the entry point to learning how to make the customer successful.

Anyone on the front line has incredible access to information about the customer, the competition, and the changing market. Sales gives us the intelligence necessary to know our customers. deliver the right products, and compete. Its really the heart of an organization, the vital connection to the customerand far too often its overlooked.

During my career, Ive had a chance to see sales from every angle. Early on, through my work as a salesperson, I understood the value of a program that would allow people to track leads, manage contacts, and keep tabs on account information. I also knew the traditional systems we had, which were expensive to buy, time-consuming to implement, and difficult to use, could be vastly improved. Observing the trends that were happening in the consumer world, I thought that sales-force automation and customer relationship management products could better serve customers if they were sold as a service and delivered over the Internet, which would make these pivotal products faster to implement, easier to use, and far less expensive. So, in 1999 I founded Salesforce with a new technology model, the cloud; a new business model, pay-as-you-go subscription services; and a new philanthropic model, donating 1 percent of Salesforces product, 1percent of Salesforces equity and 1percent of employees time to help nonprofits fulfill their missions.