7 Steps to Sales Force Transformation

We were in an office tower, meeting with a sales executive at a global hospitality company with a sales force comprising thousands of individuals worldwide. Like most global hospitality companies, the sales organization included two kinds of teams: corporate teams that pursued contracts with regional and global companies and “on property” sales teams that worked on-site at individual hotels to increase business for their properties. The executive we were talking with, Jane (not her real name), needed these two historically siloed groups—each with its own metrics, goals, and processes—to work together to better serve corporate customers. Jane’s goal was to create a “common sales language” to improve collaboration and communications. In a far-reaching conversation about her vision and the processes she wanted to drive, we turned to Jane and asked, “Do you think your sales team will buy in and adopt these changes?”

“Which levers do I pull to improve sales performance?” We hear that question a lot from sales executives. Just as a CEO is interested in revenue growth, operating margin, incremental investment, and other factors that impact the company’s stock price, sales executives want to ensure they are leveraging the right things to increase the success resulting from their sales transformation.

We were meeting with Mike Dickerson at his office in Atlanta early in the summer of 2012, and Mike had just taken on a leadership role for PGi’s Global Collaboration Services. Mike was describing his vision for PGi: a transformation from a provider of dial-up conferencing services—which have increasingly become a commodity with an intense focus on price—to a software and solutions business focused on helping companies create more value through enhanced collaboration. Mike’s and the executive team’s vision was to implement this business transformation with new sales and go-to-market capabilities that would be tested with PGi’s diamond accounts, their largest global customers. Mike described the need for a new way to engage with these customers; it would require more collaboration and consultation overall as well as function-specific insights on how collaboration can drive results. He also spoke of the internal capabilities needed to support this new level of customer engagement. These capabilities included a new account planning approach, standard sales and opportunity processes, and better resource alignment at an account level. Leveraging his background as both an entrepreneur and sales executive, Mike was able to describe his vision for what needed to change, why it needed to change, and why it needed to change now—all components of a solid vision for sales transformation.

In our research on sales force transformations for this book, the greatest challenge mentioned in both the interviews and the survey was achieving sustainable change in a sales team. Even though sales teams and leaders excel at convincing others to change, they are typically highly resistant to change themselves. It’s no accident that there are five steps required to complete in our approach to sales force transformation before moving to implementation, and this chapter focuses on steps three and four: building your case for change and gaining internal support.

The foundation of the sales transformation at Central Garden & Pet was the multiyear vision and roadmap that was created to prioritize and guide the overall effort. After our initial meeting with Paul Duval, the SVP of sales at Central Garden & Pet, we spent six weeks collaborating on a vision and a case for sales force transformation. This included ride-alongs with sales representatives and a plant tour in Madison, Georgia. There’s no substitute for experiencing a day in the life of a salesperson and speaking directly with customers. In our up-front assessment we compared the current reality with Paul’s vision of the future: a sales team with the ability to advise customers on how Central’s products and services could impact the results of their stores (sales, gross margins, inventory turns). The current reality was characterized by a mix of skill sets, inconsistent processes, and limited use of technology. Through this assessment, we were able to identify and prioritize significant gaps and outline what needed to be done, for example, in the area of sales coverage, where there were several salespeople calling on the same stores, in sales planning where inconsistent strategies for the largest accounts were included, and in selling skills where more advanced skills were needed to create a more consultative sales team.

At this point in your sales transformation journey, you have assembled your reports and your analyses; you’ve gotten buy-in from your sales team, other internal functional teams, and the C-suite. You know what transformation will require. Now it’s time to begin to implement your strategy. At this juncture, you are ready to move through implementation and your roadmap to close the gaps you have identified and to achieve your vision.

Now that you’re beginning the process of implementing your own sales transformation, let’s review several potential barriers to success. This list is not exhaustive, but like the levers outlined in chapter 2, these items apply almost universally when significant change and transformation are carried out in a sales organization. We have compiled the list from and our interviews with sales executives our own experiences that involve more than 100 transformations—some successful, others not—and in each case, one or more of these barriers were crucial for the outcome. Experience and hindsight can be great teachers. Many of the executives we interviewed indicated that they discovered these barriers only during or after transformation, not before. Our aim is to help you succeed by equipping you with these insights as you are planning and launching your sales force transformation.

One of our clients asked us how to get more out of its ecosystem of business partners, suppliers, and customers. This client had been adding to that ecosystem of partners and suppliers almost indiscriminately—and many were a losing proposition. “We don’t even know how many partners or suppliers we have,” the senior director said, almost in embarrassment. “We also do not partner with our customers enough in creating next-generation products.” The company thought that adding new partners should be focused on quantity as opposed to quality: more was better. As we researched the economics of the company’s relationships, however, we found that adding more external relationships was just adding coordination and management costs; instead, the company needed to act more strategically. For example, this company was covering low-potential markets with high-cost business partners and was triple-sourcing suppliers when it made more sense to invest in one or two strategic ones. “We need to 80/20 our ecosystem and then invest in those that make economic and strategic sense,” the senior director said when asked about what the company should do. Ultimately, the company pared the number of channel partners and suppliers by more than 50 percent and began to include customers in product ideation and development.

Although this is our final chapter covering the sales transformation approach, and the final step (step 7) in our sales transformation process, it may be the most important. As you can guess, there’s little value in investing time, money, and effort in transforming a sales organization only to see it then revert back to the earlier status quo. The ability to sustain your gains and improvements is critical to realizing a significant return on your investment in transformation.

Predicting the future is risky—and we don’t have a crystal ball showing us future trends and patterns. Over the past several decades, enterprise business-to-business selling has significantly evolved given changes in technology and communications—air travel, fax, pager, mobile phone, the Internet, and social media, among others. Across many industries, this evolution has changed both the balance of knowledge between buyers and sellers and also the expectations buyers have of sellers. Historically, successful salespeople have differentiated themselves by the products and services they offer. But as we’ve discussed throughout this book, the days of a salesperson adding value by being a talking catalog and product configurator are long gone. Today’s top sales professionals, and their customers, leverage the full breadth of technology and communication tools to differentiate themselves and their conversations; a trend that we believe will not only endure but accelerate. As Don Perry told us, “If you take a look at the buyer of the old days and the buyer of today, in the old days sellers used to look for buyers; today buyers are looking for sellers. They research. Their business analysis and access to information have enabled them to get so far down in their buying cycle that the seller of today doesn’t look like the seller of yesterday. The buyer has pushed the seller to a level of specialization, and the consequence has changed the dynamics of the sales process. The Internet has made the seller better, and the buyer better.”