<h5>Setting: Boardroom in the office of a major garment export company.</h5> <h5>Scene: Meeting of the sales team</h5>A visibly agitated Jaideep Sinha, the Sales Head, faced his team. “We have yet another complaint about our gross unprofessionalism and negligence from our biggest customer, Debrah!” Sinha waved a sheet of paper containing Debrah’s email requesting samples. “This came 40 days ago. No one acted on this. We lost an order for 40,000 pieces! On the one hand, we request for more orders from customers to fill our capacity. On the other hand, we don’t take existing orders seriously.” While what Sinha said was true, there was more to the story... “Sir, but this was not part of the original request from Debrah. They added it later,” protested Kalyan, the account head for Debrah. “Yes. But we were informed by mail. How was that missed?” Sinha countered. He was clearly upset. More so because they had completed more than 700 designs for Debrah in two months, all that hard work had now been undone with this singular oversight. “Sir!” Kalyan rose to his own defence. “This is just one case in above 50 tech packs we’ve executed for them. Moreover, we had the added responsibility of developing five tech packs for Zeswear.” “The Zeswear tech packs were delayed, too. Weren’t they?” Sinha questioned. “That’s not our fault. Zeswear was late in giving us all the details. In fact, we had to follow up a lot,” Kalyan protested. “Is that your excuse for missing this request from Debrah?” Sinha bellowed. “We cannot neglect an existing customer while we try to secure new ones. Remember, Debrah fills your order book. Orders from Zeswear might pick up, but it may take another year. Currently, we are dependent on Debrah to run our mills!”<h5> </h5><h2>Role of the sales team</h2>Kalyan’s predicament is not unique. Most sales teams in the country’s garment and textile export houses are likely familiar with similar situations. Textile manufacturing and export is an intensely competitive business in which sales teams vie for orders from large retail houses based in Europe or the USA. To do so, sales teams must help showcase their companies’ capability to reproduce ‘storyboards’ (provided by the customers’ designers) at competitive prices. Storyboards are a series of sketches, diagrams, or photographs with measurements, colour palettes, etc., that show how the design for a product develops through the main stages of manufacturing. Designers develop storyboards based on their evaluation of market trends. These storyboards are passed on for development to one or more manufacturers for development into trendy designs that will draw end customers into the brand’s stores. The ability to turn a design on a storyboard into an appealing product is key to a manufacturer’s success. In addition to the product’s look and feel, the interpretation of its design elements also determines its cost. In textiles, price is a major differentiator, as there is nothing else competitors cannot copy. So, at times, several options at different price points (and different effects) have to be submitted to the brands for their selection. The manufacturer’s sales team keeps a hawk’s eye on the numbers for each of these offers to secure the best possible margins. For this, they remain deeply involved in the entire pre-order process – from the initial discussions to order confirmation and the finalisation of all design elements (look, feel, fabric finish, yarn quality, and fit). Even after the order has arrived, the sales team continues to coordinate the necessary customer approvals to move orders from the post-order PPS sampling stage to bulk production. This means that at the same time, multiple customers are submitting multiple requests for both pre-order samples (of the future season) and PPS samples (of the current season). Each goes through various iterations involving several back-and-forth emails and comments from the designers. Approvals must also be sought for raw material sources at both the sampling and bulk manufacturing stages. During bulk manufacturing, any deviation from the mutually agreed-upon product specifications may either increase the lead time (due to rework) or escalate the production cost and eat away at profitability. As the sales team handles all the coordination needed with customers to finalise the product, they become the obvious choice to continue interacting with customers, negotiate, and obtain approvals for exceptions created during bulk production. Furthermore, they must also ensure that products are shipped on time, billing is completed, and payments are recorded in the system. The sales team is aware that missing out on any of these tasks would risk current and future orders from existing customers and could have immediate, significant financial repercussions for the company.<h5> </h5><h2>The sales dilemma</h2>Managing existing customers is crucial, as acquiring new ones is often challenging. Firstly, there is a geographic challenge – the customer is not in the same country as the manufacturer. Secondly, these customers (large retailers) are few, and those that are a good match to a particular company’s manufacturing capability are even fewer. But the biggest challenge for the sales team is getting the first appointment with a new customer. It takes time, patience, and perseverance to gain a foothold. The sales team must understand the prospective customer’s business, identify any gaps in their current supply chain, and showcase relevant capabilities to address them. They then have to develop the first samples, decipher the preferences of the customer (product quality/variety/price/fresh technologies), get the initial order, execute it, identify gaps in internal production capabilities, and build the business scale-up plan (and customer confidence) with capacity enhancements, if any. At some point, the work required to serve existing customers and their orders completely overwhelms the sales team’s capacity, compelling them to focus on 'the bird in hand’ rather than ‘two in the bush'. Consequently, the rate of adding new customers or lines becomes a function of accidental availability of sales bandwidth rather than a concerted, continuous process. But at the same time, there is always a definite need to focus on new business because of one or more of the following reasons:<ol style="list-style-type:decimal;"><li>Increasing pressure on margins from existing customers</li><li>Decreasing orders from them</li><li>Potential for better margins if the company can win new clients or new lines from existing customers</li><li>Risk in the increasing dependency on one or two major existing customers</li><li>Time-to-time underutilisation of mill capacity.</li></ol> Therefore, if the company fails to find a way to successfully service and grow both existing and new customers in an increasingly competitive environment, its profits are likely to enter a downward spiral as it continues to compete in the limited product range of existing customers. But how can the sales team develop new customers when there is no bandwidth to do this? To answer this question, it might help if one tried to answer why organisations feel that, even though most of the tasks that the sales team is involved in (about 80%) either involve no selling skills or are physically executed by other departments in the company, the sales team has to coordinate and be responsible for all of them.<h5> </h5><h2>The core issue</h2>Most companies in the industry firmly believe that customers prefer to have all their order-related discussions with a single individual in the company – i.e., a ‘single window’ of communication. It is also asserted that a single individual has to be responsible for protecting the order margin. This is expected to prevent the margin from eroding as the order progresses through the usual iterations and modifications at various stages. Are these valid beliefs? Let’s examine each of these. Firstly, can customers be comfortable with multiple windows? From the examples of the BFSI sector, retail, travel companies, insurance, among others. For those who work with multiple windows, such as call centres, websites, and branch offices, it is quite clear that customers are not particularly concerned that all their conversations are with the same person who sold them the product. In fact, someone from product development can discuss product variants more authoritatively, or someone from the bulk manufacturing team can more readily convey execution or dispatch-related information. Multiple windows’ interaction with customers can be successful as long as:<ol><li>There is the consistency of promises</li><li>There are no repeat conversations</li></ol>This can be achieved by making conversations rule-based and transactional. In the garment manufacturing business, companies also streamline all customer communication through the sales team to protect margins. The pertinent question is: Does holding one individual accountable do that? The answer lies in examining why margins sometimes erode even when no orders are accepted into the system, without ensuring that the company gains in that transaction. The multitasking sales team is constantly juggling multiple balls across various stages, from pre-order to PPS to bulk manufacturing. Sometimes, in the mayhem, a ball gets dropped. For instance, a customer email requesting an additional pocket in a garment design during the PPS sample stage might be overlooked amid the hundreds of conversations sales personnel are having about multiple products at various stages of production. So, when the irate customer finally points it out, not only does the company lose credibility, but it also has to rework as per the customer’s instructions. This can delay order completion, require air freight, or incur penalties. Such margin erosion on orders reinforces the importance of holding the sales team accountable.<figure class="image"><img style="aspect-ratio:4000/4033;" src="https://web-assets.vectorconsulting.in/storage/editor_uploads//image_1779965271.png" width="4000" height="4033"></figure>However, it is clear that holding individuals accountable doesn’t solve the problem; instead, it reinforces it.<h5> </h5><h2>Direction of solution</h2>1. Identifying and focusing on ‘real’ sales: The only truly sales activities that require ‘real’ selling skills in this business are the development of new customers or new lines/categories with existing customers. Therefore, what is needed to resolve the bandwidth dilemma is a method that releases a significant portion of the sales team’s capacity to focus on these activities.<o:p></o:p> 2. Setting up a back-end team to take up ‘non-sales' tasks: This means that all tasks of coordination and order management have to be relieved from the sales team. However, for this divestiture to be acceptable, the sales team will need the confidence that all these activities, including costing, sample finalisations, payment collections, etc., which used to happen under their oversight, will now occur with clockwork efficiency and reliability without requiring any of their capacity for coordination. For this, a back-end support team has to be created, which will work with machine-like efficiency! 3. To ensure that this backend team can work independently and effectively, they need:a. Direct access to customers<ul><li>High level of standardisation of tasks with clear handover criteria.</li><li>Tasks that are distributed to teams based on time and skill requirements (e.g., development, order management, etc.). This reduces the back-end team’s multitasking and improves their ability to return to a task after interruptions. </li></ul>b. Clear SOPs and well-defined scope and responsibilities<ul><li>Automation (wherever possible), especially to handle high-volume, repetitive tasks.</li><li>A centralised monitoring mechanism for tracking elapsed time, ensuring process adherence, and signals for right time expediting.</li></ul>When all work together seamlessly, customers’ requests and queries can be addressed without involving the sales team. This will free the sales team’s mental and physical bandwidth, allowing them to focus on 'real sales' and expanding the company’s market presence. 4. New customer acquisition: Even when non-sales activities have been eliminated from the sales team’s scope, they will still face a dilemma of prioritising between engaging with current customers and developing new ones. Compared to securing orders from existing customers, acquiring new customers is a more challenging, time-consuming process with multiple steps. The timely completion of these steps, including customer visits and preparations for them, is essential for ensuring success. Therefore, it is crucial to establish a dedicated, highly skilled business development team to identify and pitch opportunities to potential customers.These expert business development resources must be ably supported by campaign coordinators who can develop a database of potential customers, filter opportunities, plan telephonic interactions, and schedule visits. This way, the expert resources can spend more time wooing the customers. Once the business development team secures an order from a new customer and completes all necessary activities (with the help of the back-end order management team) that lead to a bulk order, the customer can be considered fully acquired and passed on to the regular sales team. 5. Growing SOB with existing customers: Once a manufacturer is designated as a supplier to a customer, unless there is a major supply disruption due to product quality or delivery commitments, orders will keep coming in automatically with minimal ‘selling’ effort. However, in an industry with very few potential new customers, there is a tremendous advantage in increasing the share of business even among existing customers. So, this team can focus exclusively on these customers, identify opportunities for line expansion and use their specialised skills to help customers select successful styles from storyboards. 6. Monitoring the sales funnel: Sales tasks (business development and regular sales) can be monitored by tracking the progress of orders through the sales funnel. Each order can be tracked as it moves through the various stages of the sales funnel using any standard CRM package. Obstacles can be proactively removed, and issues can be speedily resolved. Efforts should be made to move as quickly as possible through the funnel from lead generation to order confirmation.<figure class="image"><img style="aspect-ratio:3995/4057;" src="https://web-assets.vectorconsulting.in/storage/editor_uploads//image_1779965339.png" width="3995" height="4057"></figure><h2>Outcome</h2>This solution is based on specialisation and coordinated efforts. Its implementation will inevitably necessitate breaking down traditional mindsets and silos. It may also involve modifying performance measures and compensation plans to reflect and reward combined effort. However, when multiple teams (centralised monitoring, order management, development team, internal sales teams, and business development managers) work collaboratively to engage customers, more than 50% of the sales team’s capacity can be released while ensuring an improved quality of service to customers. This released capacity can be leveraged to acquire new customers and expand into new categories. The increased flow of customers and categories will, over time, yield a healthy order book, high-capacity utilisation, and a continuous increase in revenue. Moreover, disciplined and systematic sales activities bring transparency and agility, enabling companies to respond quickly to emerging market dynamics.

Key Takeaways

The belief that clients prefer a ‘single window’ of communication impacts textile companies. These companies can reap significant rewards by challenging this belief and changing their systems, increasing bandwidth while bringing greater transparency and agility.

Disentangling sales: Increasing sales productivity in textile companies

<h4>Disentangling sales: Increasing sales productivity in textile companies</h4>

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Vector Consulting Group - Research and Publications: A central team that handles sales support tasks can help garment companies grow sales faster. Discover how.