Sales & Marketing

Sales and marketing generate direct top-line and bottom-line impact: They are crucial levers for your company’s revenue and competitiveness, and fundamental factors in both your current performance and your future profitability and growth. Yet, few functions have experienced such tremendous change across the last two decades – and require such care in balancing out the needs of business with the expectations of customers to build long-lasting success.

Our sales and marketing consulting experts offer profound knowledge on a wide range of topics relevant for your sales and marketing operations. They have their finger on the pulse with regards to new digital and technology trends and how they impact the way in which sales and marketing can interact with customers.

Importantly, we take a “customer first” approach. For us, this means that any project needs to have at its heart an understanding of the customer and their inherent needs and wants that must be addressed. This is always coupled with a view on successfully transforming sales and marketing organizations and supporting their strategy processes. Equipped with this knowledge, our consultants can help you design a best-in-class strategy and ensure that your sales and marketing operations are consumer-centric, effective and led by strategy.

As a leading strategy consulting firm, Roland Berger advises on a wide range of areas, from ensuring an end-to-end, frictionless customer experience to designing go-to-market and market entry strategies that guarantee sustainable growth. Whether you need to create an industry-leading sales organization, optimize your media spend, boost your revenue in certain markets or channels, reshape your marketing strategy, evaluate and reset your price points, launch a sales force transformation initiative or ensure profitable digital growth, our consultants work side-by-side with you to ensure that you achieve your goals.

For us, sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Working on one side of the coin always requires a knowledge of the broader impact of our actions. This means that all topics are interrelated and require a comprehensive approach. We specialize in a number of core areas in which our consulting teams offer in-depth expertise and strong industrial knowhow:

Unleashing the full potential of AI

Generative AI is expected to have the greatest impact on customer-facing business functions, boosting sales productivity, marketing efficiency, and the customer support experience. Despite challenges such as bias, privacy, and legal concerns, organizations must accelerate to capitalize on its transformative potential in marketing and sales.
Within marketing and sales, generative AI offers profound benefits across the value chain for both B2C and B2B sectors.

To effectively harness the potential of AI, we suggest a three-phased approach:

1) Use case identification

• Understand the specific activities conducted and the key challenges the business is facing ​
• Identify long list of use cases and prioritize them based evaluation criteria

2) Readiness assessment

• Evaluate the current AI capabilities of the organization ​
• Assess and identify gaps, strengths, and areas for improvement

3) Target Operating Model

• Define new target operating and tech model according to identified AI uplift recommendations & use cases, incl. required resources & capabilities​
• Start implementation of operating model changes

Digital sales, D2C and e-commerce

We help clients understand the fundamental requirements and expectations of their customers when it comes to selling digitally to them. A key task in developing e-commerce operations is to define the potential scope of digital business in your specific industry in terms of coverage and share of revenue. We can help you find the right approach to selling in a digital world, with the right operating model for your organization. In addition to guiding you towards a customer-centric digital sales strategy, our experts will help you define an organizational concept that addresses digitalization in sales and marketing, and maximizes direct interactions with the buyers and users of your products. Working side-by-side with you, we can draw up a suitable roadmap for developing a customer-tailored digital ecosystem and help you develop an agile mindset and culture within your organization. In addition, we offer access to the right partners and technology to implement your strategy in the shortest possible time, with the most effective use of available resources.

Combining customer experience, digitalization and sustainability excellence for a new flywheel of growth

Many companies need to find new ways to rethink and reignite their growth potential. They often look to role models with high and sustainable growth for inspiration. So-called "born good" companies, those with an environmental or social purpose built in, and "digital native" companies, those with integrated digital-first business models, unite many of the success factors that matter in today's marketplace. We have identified and validated the key success factors that can be reapplied to established companies, these being 1) customer experience, 2) digitalization and 3) purposeful sustainability, enabled by culture and organization. Importantly, customer experience, digitalization and purposeful sustainability actions can reinforce each other and start or accelerate a flywheel of growth. Read our publication Growth hacking - a new flywheel for growth to learn more!.

Sales growth and sales force transformation

Our team will help you gain a clear picture of the true performance of your current sales organization. This task is critical in defining a sales strategy aimed at achieving targeted and profitable growth, and then setting up or optimizing your sales processes accordingly. We can also work with you to design a performance-oriented compensation system that ensures your sales strategy is brought to life, and build a sales steering approach that is based on KPIs (key performance indicators) and aligned with your sales strategy. In addition, we offer expertise in areas such as defining, implementing and optimizing value-based customer segmentation, driving customer value management, improving sales performance and sales team efficiency, optimizing price setting and price points , and optimizing trade terms. Plus, we have many years' experience building go-to-market and route-to-market strategies for our clients, both for introducing new offerings and for growing the geographical footprint.

Distribution channel and omnichannel optimization

We work with alongside clients to define a suitable omnichannel strategy for their specific industry environment and build an optimized channel mix. This involves measuring and improving channel effectiveness across direct and indirect channels, assessing and optimizing the omnichannel approach, building and launching new channels and improving management of partner networks.

Pricing

Our pricing experts can run structured pricing audits to determine your current levers and improvement potentials. We can help you define a suitable pricing strategy and develop a roadmap to smart pricing. We also have expertise in applying value-based pricing (pricing based on customers' willingness to pay) and building data-driven smart pricing (pricing based on customer data analytics). We can help you detail and execute price increase campaigns, and identify and refine monetization models, including elements such as subscription models and XaaS (anything as a service). Other services include preparing, providing coaching for and monitoring price negotiations, defining pricing target operating models, evaluating market-ready pricing tools and vendor selection for pricing software implementations, and providing strategic support for integrating pricing tools in the wider IT ecosystem.

Branding and brand purpose

We help clients refine their brand strategy and support them through the process of portfolio optimization. In addition, we offer our expertise in defining robust customer value propositions and formulating a brand purpose that resonates with consumers.

Digital marketing

Our in-house expertise ranges from performing a customer journey audit and redesign to measuring marketing effectiveness. We can help you develop a purpose-driven marketing strategy, define a digital marketing strategy (including social media marketing and optimization of the marketing channel mix), integrate customer experience management, and optimize marketing spend/ROI (including media spend optimization).

Communications

Roland Berger consultants can assist you in defining a high-impact communication strategy and communication goals, orchestrating end-to-end communication channels and performing process optimization for communication planning. In addition, we can help clients enhance their communication planning and tracking, and ensure buy-in and motivation within their organization.

Marketing organization

We offer profound expertise in establishing in-house marketing structures, specifying key roles and responsibilities, and identifying key stakeholders and committees within the marketing system. Our experts can perform process optimization for marketing activity planning, identifying key tools supporting marketing operations and tracking marketing effectiveness. Further services include designing and improving agency models to maximize your marketing impact, running agency pitches and moderating selection decisions.