At a minimum, make sure your sales management team understands basic cost concepts, such as:
- cost drivers
- activity-based accounting
- customer profitability
- value-add and value chain analysis
- target costing
And, a cursory understanding of the role of cost information for tactical and strategic decisions is helpful too. Use tools such as: budgets, variance analysis, benchmarking, transfer pricing and the balanced scorecard to illustrate planning and control and performance measurement systems.
All of this is useful to help facilitate a successful implementation of an organizations’ strategies.