Using Installed Base Selling to Maximize Revenue: A Step-by-Step Approach to Achieving Long-Term Profitable Growth

By Remi Gicquel and Paul-André Lambert

There is no such thing as an easy sale. However, selling to an existing customer—whether by refreshing an old product or introducing a new and different product—is often easier, faster, and returns higher margins. Centering your organization’s sales strategy on your installed base is a smart and proven way to achieve long-lasting, profitable growth.

Using Installed Base Selling to Maximize Revenue reveals a step-by-step, integrated approach you can begin using today. Authors Remi Gicquel and Paul-André Lambert show how you can apply this robust and reliable end-to-end solution by illustrating concepts though real-world case studies from Spotify, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nestlé, and more. Full of wisdom fit for the digital era, this book presents the results of the authors’ experience and research into current installed base selling processes, identifying, from an objective point of view, what works and what does not.

This book explains fundamental concepts such as the profitable growth paradox, the installed base profit wedge, operational methodologies for managing your installed base selling transformation, and much more. Innovative companies protect and nurture their most valuable asset—their customers and the data that defines them. They put installed base selling at the heart of their sales strategy. Now, it’s your turn!

What You Will Learn

• How to maximize the return from installed base customers

• Fundamental concepts such as the profitable growth paradox, the installed base profit wedge, and turnkey operational sales methodologies to best maneuver your sales teams

• Keys to changing patterns to become a company that can enjoy higher profitable revenues for years

Who This Book Is For

General Managers, Sales and Marketing Leaders who are eager to transform their business to secure long-lasting profits, and for leaders looking for a pragmatic approach to transform their sales force to harvest the potential of their existing customers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Apress
• Release date: Aug 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781484251461

Book preview

Part IThe Strategy

© Remi Gicquel, Paul-André Lambert  2020

R. Gicquel, P.-A. LambertUsing Installed Base Selling to Maximize Revenuehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5146-1_1

1. Installed Base Selling

The sales strategy foundation

Remi Gicquel¹  and Paul-André Lambert²

(1)

CORENC, France

(2)

Bierges, Belgium

Today’s business marketplace is demanding a greater focus on the customer and seller experience. In this chapter we will highlight the importance to position installed base selling at the heart of the sales strategy. We will use our own experience at Hewlett Packard Enterprise to depict the challenges many a company faces and to present the opportunity of centering sales strategy on installed base selling.

The beginning at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.

—Michael E. Porter¹

The Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) was founded in 1939 by Bill Hewlett and David Packard, next to Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California.

Like many companies, HP has historically been structured by product lines and business units centered on a strong product focus. The DNA and value add of HP is product innovation and solution selling. For many years the organization and the strategy of the company were driven by this product line structure.

In the last two decades, HP changed to put the customer first and introduce an increased focus on customer segments and industry verticals as part of the company strategy. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)—the company split since then—now operates with a matrix organizational model balancing the product dimension with the customer specific needs. The company strategy is aligned to this structure and combines a product focus with a customer segment focus.

This was the perfect opportunity to introduce installed base selling as the cornerstone of the sales strategy. Here is how it started.

The origins of this book can be traced back in 2015, when HPE sponsored a project to improve installed base selling results. The focus was on one business unit in a group of several countries in Northern Europe. We were responsible for this initiative. It felt like a start-up project, and we were given a free hand in the framework of HPE strategy of continuous customer experience improvement, to drive this pilot.

We defined the installed base as the information that connects our customers and the assets (products or services) we sold to them. To be relevant, this information needs to contain key attributes qualifying both the customers and the assets, as well as a measure of accuracy and completeness.

We started with an inventory of all the available installed base initiatives across the business units and countries globally.

Installed base management was decentralized, with almost as many installed base programs and initiatives as we had business units, customer segments, and countries. With this approach in place, while everyone in the value delivery chain wanted to do a good job, each initiative was focused on a subset of the end to end, preventing a comprehensive view and global performance execution.

For this reason, sales organizations in the countries perceived installed base insights as being fragmented, complex, and uncoordinated, with no clear definition, inconsistent scope, and poor value add.

To put it simply, this was resulting in little engagement from the country sales organizations, as there was no clear value proposition for them to get involved or follow the recommendations. Many of the initiatives were very back ended with little to no sales engagement, despite the huge business potential outlined. We were leaving money on the table!

This situation was not unique; in many of the companies we have met, we could observe the same disjointed pattern between the back end and the front end, the business units, and the country field sales organizations.

The major challenges reported by the teams in the field, we have interviewed, were data quality, programs too complex, too slow, and absence of coordination between the different business units installed base sales initiatives, leading to partial and inconsistent information at the customer level. The net effect was a lack of trust in the data and on the sales leads generated by the installed base programs. Another consistent strong feedback we heard was the global programs were not well aligned with the local sales priorities. Bottom line, the way to engage the local sales teams was inefficient and counterproductive.

Coming from the sales strategy and planning organization, we were in a very good position to influence both the business units, the sales teams and the supporting operations teams. Very quickly we saw the opportunity to align the stars and provide a clear value proposition for the business to engage around an integrated installed base selling initiative.

We established a partnership with a senior sales leader and redesigned the installed base program from scratch. That led us to form the new installed base selling model based on a few simple