Over the last 20 years, sales have been the architect of their own demise. Buyers have taken ownership of the customer journey and no longer allow the seller to dictate it.
The modern sales force needs to change. They need to become a new type of Value Creator – one that builds insights and fits their solution to the buyer – rather than the other way around. They need to sell with a buyer’s perspective.
High-performing salespeople dominate organizations, demanding ever-increasing compensation – often to the detriment of those around them. You can’t afford to lose them, but you can’t afford to keep them either. When they do leave, companies must hire even more expensive resources to replace them, as they failed to focus on developing the talent they have to be able to take their place. The result is a lack of scalability and an ever-increasing cost base, without any real improvement in overall performance.
A high-performing sales team should be just that – you need to harness them as part of the intellectual property of the organization, rather than risk your business on the shoulders of a small handful of individuals.
There are a thousand ways to conceal bad news and underperformance in sales. A lack of visibility around what customer-facing individuals do, data split across complex and often conflicting tools, and a desire to ‘do everything’ – even when it’s not productive – creates a lack of accountability and makes it impossible to understand the effectiveness and competence of your team. Sales workforces are traditionally incentivized to hide the problems, to only deliver good news and protect their own interests, even if that means doing something someone else should be doing for them.
Improving effectiveness, transparency, and accountability is at the core of what we do, making sure that accurate intelligence on real behavior is communicated right up to the CEO level to ensure better decisions and actions can be taken.
How do you measure the return on investment from a training program and thereby justify the expenditure – not just for this year but for next year too? Most training courses result in the trainer asking the attendees to complete a series of questions at the end of the course, which is more likely to reflect on how nice the lunch was, whether the trainer was a nice person and whether they managed to get out a few hours early, than whether the content was actually useful (it might be one question from the five).
If you want to keep hold of your L&D budget, the answer is that you need to objectively measure the change in people’s behavior, and we’ve built one of the most comprehensive methodologies and toolsets to do just that. We can identify the training people really need, prove how training impacts what they actually do, and continually measure and track progress toward their desired state on an ongoing basis.
Repositioning Sales Workforces
- Positioning your teams around how buyers want to buy, and selling with a buyer’s perspective
- Positioning the right people, equipped with the right skills, to do the right tasks and organizing them into high-performing teams
- Positioning and motivating them to do the right things for the organization, not just themselves
- Positioning your business for success by building a ‘buyer-centric’ culture, fit for today and for the future
Identify the right combination of knowledge, skills and behaviors for teams and individuals to succeed.
Implement a targeted competency upgrade program, tailored to individuals and delivered at pace and at scale with measurable outcomes.
Redesign your sales processes to make them more ‘buyer-centric’ and support the outcomes your customers need.
Focus your sales teams on activities that generate value for your customers and your business, and reduce the things that eat their time but deliver nothing.
Create a ‘buyer-centric’ culture where everyone is pulling in the same direction – the buyers.
Build KPIs and competencies for you and your teams that promote accountability, develop the right behaviors and encourage everyone to invest in their own development.
The 4-Stage Process
Our Change Programs follow a clear process that is reviewed and confirmed with you every step of the way. Each step has a clearly defined set of goals and outcomes, so that you can see the real impact of the program on your business.
It starts with listening to you and understanding your business. Understanding your concerns, your challenges, your strategy, your goals, and your aspirations. Once we understand who you are and who you want to be, our work – delivering the specific outcome that you need – begins.
All engagements start here.
Everything is rarely as it seems – having someone from the outside look under the hood can highlight things that have long been hidden from sight.
We do much more than just scratch the surface. We build an in-depth picture of the health, behaviors, competencies, and true performance of your team. We delve into your environment, explore how your people are spending their time and find the things that are stopping them from doing what they should be.
This asset gives us our starting point and informs the strategy we need to take to get to the outcome you need, creating one of the benchmarks against which we measure our success.
How do we get to the outcomes you need?
Everyone’s desired outcome is different. One size fits all or generic playbook approaches don’t work as they aren’t specific to your business and its needs.
At this stage, we work with you to help you properly quantify your desired state and then build the right plan to get you there. Culture, product, market, history, workforce demographics, and geography all weigh differently in how we get you successfully from A to B, and no two plans are ever the same.
Your outcome from this is a coherent plan – a set of actionable steps and clear, phased objectives designed to deliver your outcomes.
Execute well, deliver the plan, and bank the results.
This is the hardest part. Making this happen in a way that is safe and sustainable isn’t easy and requires commitment from everyone involved.
Implementation is precise and methodical, designed to deliver visible benefits early and for everyone. We phase the program in over a timeframe that considers the constraints and practicalities of your business, and is sympathetic to those who might find change more difficult. Your teams will be equipped with the right structures, competencies, training, tools, and processes to make the change stick.
We’ve done this many times. We know what works and more importantly, we know how to do it.
Monitor and Continually Improve.
Our goal is to create lasting change by building internal capability within your business, creating the momentum needed to continually build and improve your capability. You don’t want to have to keep coming back for more, and we don’t want you to have to.
The Snapshot and Direction we created upfront now give us our benchmarks – giving you clear data on how you are tracking, where any gaps are, whether any further improvements need to be made, and where we’ve succeeded. This data is built from our competency models and performance metrics, giving you ongoing clarity and accountability – enabling you to ensure it’s not a flash in the pan but change that stands the test of time.
