Hitting Your Growth Targets in Asia

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Offer Unconventional Incentives

One U.S.-based manufacturing company we work with in Guangdong, China, kept losing its top salespeople to competing firms that offered incremental increases in pay and titles. Senior management began thinking about nontraditional incentive programs and recognized that a significant aspirational purchase in modern China is a personal car. (In 2010 alone, 13.8 million passenger cars were sold in China, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, making it the world's largest auto market.) The company therefore developed an incentive scheme in which it paid 50 percent of the monthly car payments, allowing the salesperson to own the car in full after a three-year period at the company. The practice instilled loyalty, improved customer relationship management, and led to a reduced turnover rate of key sales staff.

Create Visibility to Drive Performance

One Fortune 500 technology company with years of experience in Asia ranks its salespeople in the region across a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer acquisition and retention as well as salesperson efficiency and effectiveness. Rather than keep the results confidential, this company chose to create an online dashboard that tracks employees' performance across all KPIs on an ongoing basis, ranking them in five tiers based on performance. The results were impressive. Employees in the middle of the pack strove to move up, especially those in the third and fourth tiers who were most concerned about their standing; meanwhile salespeople in the fifth tier were automatically placed on a rigid coaching program. This unique approach led to healthy competition that drove continuous improvement and weeded out consistently low performers who were not worth investing in over the long term.

Establish a Team Approach to Sales

One European consumer goods company operating in Asia chose to build loyalty by making its employees feel like part of a team. It hired experts in each of the customer segments it focused on and set up processes within the local sales organizations to encourage sharing of expertise and team-developed best practices. They set a common sales goal for each team and promoted group problem-solving at account presentations, which improved team cohesion and fostered company loyalty. Overall, they found that team-based selling processes lower turnover in Asian markets by building relationships within the sales force. They also minimize disruptions in service created by the loss of any individual sales manager.

Asia CEOs have to be creative to hit their targets in China, India, and other emerging markets. Sales force management continues to rank high on the list of their challenges in the region as the competitive environment for top talent in Asia grows fiercer. Top-performing Asia CEOs have found that success requires striking a balance between corporate and local strengths to address the complexities of these markets. Whether it is localizing the sales force to achieve ambitious sales targets, reorganizing distribution networks to reach consumers in third-tier cities, or building a decentralized organization with the authority to make fast decisions in rapidly changing environments—the Asia CEO is one of the most dynamic roles in Western multinational companies today.

Joel Backaler is a director at Frontier Strategy Group, an emerging markets-focused business advisory firm based in Washington, D.C. with regional offices in Singapore, London and Miami. He is also author of TheChinaObserver.com, an award-winning China business blog. A fluent Mandarin speaker and former Fulbright scholar, he has lived and worked in Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore.