The Extended Enterprise - Part 3

A Sales Architecture : targeting the Enterprise companies

In the Customer Relationship Value Chain, Enterprise Business Representatives (EBR) rarely support Bottom Up business development strategies based on federating large numbers of small and medium size businesses.

In the traditional sales patterns Enterprise Business Representatives (EBR) methodically prioritize and prospect into enterprise companies structured with a president, vice presidents and divisions. Often, EBR are themselves part of regional teams, consisting of a Regional Vice President and a select number of Account Executives which focus on  «Enterprise companies».

In this traditional Top Down sales model, leads, contacts, opportunities and sales originates from prospects at the top of the hierarchy list. EBR create and prioritize targeted account lists, methodically prospect into the accounts, and conduct high-level conversations with senior executives about their business operations.

This point of view is efficient to generate sales with large organizations but is ill equipped to efficiently address sales leads coming from large number of small organizations and individuals in the process to federate.

Increasing marketing attention to Bottom Up Enterprise Architecture

Over the past 5 years, convergence of communication and marketing tools has improved the capacity of aggregators to federate small and medium size businesses in cohesive business development Enterprises.

At the same time the economic crisis highlighted that traditional road shows, economic missions, magazine advertizing and trade shows and not necessarily the most efficient marketing tools.

Several industries already rebalanced their Enterprise Architecture, increasing access to the markets though Bottom Up Work-flows This strategy in the Customer Relationship Value Chain is often emerging using WEB centric software to federate large numbers of small and medium size organizations. The increased efficiency of the Bottom Up Approach is common knowledge in the Travel, Insurance, and Financial Service industries.

• Would travelers deal with a travel agent who would not use an online reservation system and who could only sell travels in the one or two locations they visited in the past months?
• Would home buyers deal with a real estate agent who does not have MLS system and who could only access information on houses they visited?
• Would investors engage with agents who would not have access to online performance reports?

Despite the enormous sales opportunities arising from federated organizations, still several sales development organizations knowingly decide not to pay attention to this type of business architecture. They,

• Focus almost exclusively under the Top Down Enterprise Company marketing-sales model.
• Work mostly with the last opportunity contacts and neglect to systematically following up large number of leads;
• Rely on few trade show participation to increase their sales networks;
• Usually adopt a regional sales structure focusing to prospects located close to their office;
• Loose sales reporting capacities on all sales leads that cannot be converted immediately into opportunities.

There is nothing wrong with these strategic choices. These organizations do not adapt because their managers do not perceive economic incentives to change for more cost effective, flexible, and efficient strategies.

In turn, their choices create opportunities for other organizations who see the benefits to better balancing their Top Down approach to the market with Bottom Up Enterprise Architectures.

For example, in computing, innovative companies increased performance through Cloud Computing.Likewise, in the Customer Relationship Value chain, other organizations are positioning themselves to federate large numbers of small organizations to increase access to market.

More...
Part 1: Enterprise Architecture in commerce
Part 2: A Bottom Up Enterprise Architecture in computing: Cloud Computing
Part 3: A Sales Architecture : targeting the Enterprise companies
Part 4: The Extended Enterprise for Export clusters