Sales executives are losing sleep these days thanks to more channels, regulations, complicated products, and demands from customers. Sales is a whole new animal—especially business-to-business (B2B) sales—and companies worldwide know they must radically alter the way they operate. We have four suggestions for them.

What causes one leading company to stay consistently ahead of the market while another formerly thriving company flounders? The question is intriguing—and pressing, too, during these times of volatility. To explore the reasons and possible solutions, we conducted a study of industry champions. The result was a matrix that measures market success—a combination of growth in sales relative to market growth, and market share relative to the next largest competitor. Where BCG's matrix was created to help companies plan their portfolios, this matrix is used to chart a company's evolution and derive insights about its strategies. We call it the four seasons matrix:

• Spring. Companies that have outgrown their market but are not (yet) market leaders
• Summer. World leaders that have outgrown their markets
• Autumn. World leaders with below-average growth, gradually losing their positions
• Winter. Market followers that are growing more slowly than their market

We chose the axes of growth and market share because both metrics have a strong, proven relationship to long-term profitability and shareholder value. Combining those measures provides a solid basis for picking long-term winners.

For businesses seeking to improve profits, the low-hanging fruit is obvious. Fixes, such as reducing manufacturing costs, improving marketing effectiveness, or optimizing a supply chain are typically among the first to be implemented. Thus, a company that has already made such improvements faces a challenge. Does it, like the fox, conclude that anything else is out of reach and therefore not worthwhile? In such challenging economic times, a company can't afford to draw such conclusions. Does it then run for a ladder and raise it to a spot where, at first glance, more fruit appears to be within reach? Because of past improvement activities that seemed promising but failed to produce bottom-line results, many companies are wisely hesitant to do so. So is there a way to take a more holistic approach—to use the ladder to learn more about the tree, use scaffolding to align efforts to achieve productive results, and even prune the tree's branches to improve the likelihood of a long-term sustainable harvest?

Yes, there is a way. We call our approach Expanding the Profit Frontier. We've used it to help companies improve overall earnings 300 to 500 basis points before interest and taxes. For example, one company saw a 1 to 2 percent revenue lift when it aligned its pricing and discount strategies with a cost-to-serve model for each customer segment. Another company, initially planning to implement a single fixed-cost reduction strategy, instead combined this one initiative with another designed to streamline the product portfolio, and achieved six times the benefits with this more holistic approach.

Success for these companies was achieved using proven tools to address all of their profit frontiers (cost reductions, price increases, portfolio adjustments and other actions)—and doing so simultaneously as part of a continual business process to ensure maximum profitability both today and in the future.