The Pepsi Bottling Group is first and foremost a selling organization. To sell more, we need to sell better. According to more than 4,500 of our customers surveyed, selling better means making their top priorities our own.

In 2002, we set out to improve the measures our customers ranked as most important: the accuracy of product deliveries and management of inventory levels; timing and quality of service; and the responsiveness of our salespeople.

Our goal is to become a world-class selling organization and the preferred supplier of our customers, and we have allocated the resources to provide our sales teams with the training, tools and incentives to achieve that status. We spent tens of thousands of hours in the U.S. and Canada putting our front line salespeople through the first phase of PBG's proprietary training and certification process, upgrading their business knowledge and standardizing their selling methods, making them more valuable business partners for our customers.

Training was one component of the 2002 agenda; motivation was another. To inspire our salesforce to exceed customer expectations, PBG has developed a recognition program we call "Circles of Excellence" that will reward our best salespeople at every level of the organization, from the front line to top-level management.

We restructured our sales compensation system for better alignment with the main focus of our sales force: volume growth. The new system rewards our front line for in-store selling and execution results, and, through a tiered commission design, puts a premium on sales of our more profitable packages.

The year also marked the rollout of a transformational tool for our U.S. sales teams: the Next Generation Handheld computer, a powerful technology that will provide our sales reps real-time data to make fact-based sales presentations, pre-determine product "voids" for each account, and help resolve issues such as "out-of-stocks" and time-consuming paperwork.

In more than one way, the future of PBG rests in the hands of every member of our sales force. Our goal: to make sure they are the most capable hands that our customers shake.