Improving My Sales Force
Building high-performance sales DNA
Are you faced with?
Missing Sales Targets
Best talent leaving?
Struggling to find and win new customers?
Hard to recruit good people?
Competitors eating your lunch?
Poor ROI on sales tools and processes?
On average, 80% of a typical sales team is pointing in the wrong direction.
Do any of these sound like you?
You’re telling your customers what they already know. The customer journey is dictated by them, not by you.
Sales teams are engaging with buyers too late in the cycle when decisions are already made. The only thing you have left to sell on is price, in a race to the bottom with your competitors.
Your business is talking to the wrong people, at the wrong time, about the wrong thing.
Marketing, sales and customer success aren’t working together to drive retention, acquisition and growth. They are often working against each other. as they are all looking for different outcomes.
Your real performance blockers are hidden by the environment.
Sales teams are engaging with buyers too late in the cycle when decisions are already made. The only thing you have left to sell on is price, in a race to the bottom with your competitors.
You are over-reliant on high-performing individuals.
How we help
Many organizations will offer to try to improve your performance through a training program or a piece of technology. But these quick-fix approaches tend not to address fundamental concerns or create permanent impact.
Our approach transforms large sales teams – delivering more strategic, efficient and effective organizations that grow – through comprehensive, multilayered ‘buyer-centric’ change programs.
Our goal is to create a ‘Buyer-centric’ culture in your business, creating an impact that endures, and in a way that enables you to be self-sufficient once we’re gone.
We have already helped many businesses to build and embed Buyer-Centric Cultures.
To date, well over 100,000 individuals have benefitted from our Change Programs, in over 40 countries, and in multiple languages. No matter how complex, diffuse and diverse, we can help advise and lead your sales organization through the change that needs to happen.
Where we do our best work?
Redefine what sales means in your organization by ensuring your teams are aligned with how today’s buyer thinks. You need to build healthy, efficient, functioning customer-facing teams that sell with a buyer’s perspective.
Improving the competency of your teams
You know your teams don’t have the skills they need but you don’t know how to solve it. You need to objectively understand how truly competent your teams are, where the gaps are, and find a way to raise the bar.
Adapting to a merger or acquisition
You have two teams, two sets of products, two sets of tools and two – often competing – strategies. You need to optimize everything, create efficiency, understand how best to align your resources, and build a shared culture and environment in the quickest and most effective way possible.
Realigning your teams to a new GTM strategy
Make sure your teams can adapt to changes in your market, whether that be by embracing cloud, becoming solution or service-led, or simply changing their existing positioning to reflect the modern buyer.
Focusing training where it’s really needed
Your training budget is declining and you need to find a way to do more with less. You need a way to understand what training people really need, activate your pockets of best practice and help your managers understand what coaching really is and how to do it.
Design of sales process, systems and tools
You’ve got a complex environment packed full of under-utilized tools and broken processes. It costs a fortune and doesn’t deliver. You need to refine, realign and build efficient processes that are optimized around outcomes, rather than creating yet more admin that slows everyone down.
Improving My Sales Force
The what, the why, the how...
To understand us, how we work and why we do things the way we do – we have listed four common problem areas, and our approach to each.
The ‘Buyer Owns the Process’ Problem
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.
The ‘High Performers Holding Your Business to Ransom’ Problem
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.
The ‘Low Efficiency, No Visibility & Lack of Accountability‘ Problem
The ‘How Do We Measure The Impact’ Problem
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
People
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.
Process
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.
Environment
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.
1) Snapshot
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.
2) Direction
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.
3) Activation
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.
4) Momentum
Monitor and continually improve.
Our goal is to create lasting change by building internal capability within your business, creating the momentum needed to improve your capability.
The Snapshot and Direction we created upfront now give us our benchmarks – showing 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.
Self-Paced Learning
Buyer's Perspective Learning Modules
Over the past decade, buyer behavior has shifted. More stakeholders are involved in every decision, processes are increasingly automated, and access to technology has led to more informed buyers.
It’s no longer enough to have a great product or solution. What matters is your salespeople’s ability to advise and guide change from the buyer’s perspective.
Your time is precious, so we’ve packaged our award-winning methodology into bite-sized learning modules so you can empower your sales team with buyer-centric selling techniques.
Our proven methodology
Engaging with a customer before they even recognise the need for a change gives you an 80% chance of securing that business.
8%
YoY
growth
Achieved by a language
service
and software vendor
150%
Increase in
pipeline
32%
YoY improvement
in win rates
Achieved by Telco following program implementation
Your sales team will learn how to guide customers through their decision-making process, gain consensus, and secure lasting relationships.
Sales Process Simplified
What is the problem with my current sales process?
Despite advances in technology to help our salespeople keep pace with this change, processes and systems all focus in the wrong places! CRM solutions and the myriad of supporting revenue enablement platforms focus on qualifying the customer as a fit for your sales process, qualifying them in or out faster limiting the seller to focus on those few remaining ‘ideal fits’. They miss the fundamentals – what is the buyer looking to achieve and how do we influence that thinking and demonstrate how we can actually help?
It doesn’t matter how great your product or solution is; what matters is the extent to which your sellers are entrusted to advise and steer change. To achieve that, you need to make sure that your sales process and systems are aligned with the way today’s buyer buys.
What our customers think
“If you want your sales process to move from limiting its focus to just those opportunities you are most likely to win into converting more prospects into new opportunities and increasing your win rate, then look no further than STR.”
Head of Americas Sales
SaaS Vendor
“At last a solution that can allow us to modernise our sales approach in the technology stack of our choice, implanting our new CRM using this model – game changer!”
Head of Sales
Global Logisitcs
“The STR solution provides the structure we need to become masters of our own change program supported by processes that add value to our clients and better win rates.”
Head of Sales Operations
Global Fintech
Our methodology has been trusted by Enterprise clients for 14+ years, and is now accessible to you.
BUSINESS: FOCUSED
We created BUSINESS: FOCUSED to align your sales process and systems, to today’s buyer mentality. When you genuinely help customers overcome problems and explore new solutions, you create a trust that lasts.
Alignment between Buyers and Sellers Actions. Enable your sellers to recognise where the buyer is in their process and what action to take.
Drive sellers to increase pipeline accuracy and to engage where the highest probability of a win occurs.
A full change program that shows the way from misalignment to optimal buyer process alignment.
Your journey from start to end
Meet
Let us show you how it works. Schedule a meeting.
Onboarding
Time to get everyone on board. We make this part easy.
Discovery
You don’t know what you don’t know. Let us help you Discover the challenges.
Implementation
We work with your team, enabling them to align your process and systems to the buyer process. We train your managers to enable your staff!
Understand Your Potential Gains
Use the below calculator to understand the potential productivity gains you could gain by optimizing the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales teams. Begin by dragging the handles in the pie chart to reflect the average percentage of the time your sales team spent doing each activity.
