Background

Traditionally, within AF-KLM the focus within Sales has been mainly on cost-cutting,
how to do the same or more things with less people
Traditionally, a lot of focus has been on developing state of the art Revenue Management
& Pricing concepts, approach and tools
On developing front running e-commerce, social hub, brand management and marketing excellence
There was less focus on establishing commercial excellence within our Sales organisation

Outcome

We ‘discovered’ that our sales teams often didn’t extensively prepare themselves before customer meetings,
often didn’t have an objective, joint agenda
During the customer meeting sales reps showed a lot of push behaviour, communicating the new product,
service and network features, solving problems and conducted other servicing actions
And often did a poor follow up after the customer meeting

Field research

More than 25 teams have been visited, in-depth analysis done on current way of working of the commercial teams and I made 50 joint visits to corporate clients and travel agents

Request by Commercial Management Europe

How can we improve our sales teams in such a way that they become best in class in the airline industry?
Become opportunity, action and customer driven? What is needed for this?

Internal debate

Together with feedback of an external sales trainer we asked ourselves:
How is it possible that with all the sales trainings we had in place and the many projects at HQ
like ‘from Farming to Hunting’ that we observed such behaviour?

Approach

We decided to use a change management approach in order to achieve Commercial Excellence
within our Sales teams
We set up a Steering Committee with key commercial leaders

Objective

We defined with these leaders what we wanted: a more opportunity, action and customer driven sales team
We set up project groups which defined the sales processes, tools needed, roles and capabilities,
And set up a measurement dashboard to monitor progress made by sales teams and leaders
Sales Managers were seen as change managers who needed to coach and develop their teams to improve the quality of their sales activities
With L&D department workshops were developed which were focused on the outcome of the project groups (what is expected from sales teams and sales leaders)
Communication was set up via central and local Sales Excellence I-share platforms, e-newsletters, videos etc
Best Practices were shared in workshops, for both sales teams and leaders and were seen as very useful
Celebrate success – Sales Award ceremonies were organised, sales excellence champions were invited to Amsterdam and Paris HQs to meet the CEO’s
Customer researches where conducted to monitor the quality of sales activities of our sales teams from a customer’s perspective

Results

Better Results, motivated staff and satisfied customers