Organisations are a reflection of the way people think and interact. Typically, the wider organisational culture is not taken into account when changing the behaviours of a sales force. Training delivered to uplift sales skills is mostly focused on product, technical knowledge, and general behavioural change. In order to have a sales force become more successful and effective the behaviours that need changing must be done so within the context of the wider organisation.

It is not enough to change the organisations sales strategies, structures, practices and systems, unless the ‘thinking’ that produced those strategies, structures or systems also changes. It is important for any change approach to be inclusive of these strategies, embedding behaviours where possible and advocating positive change through the integration of activities.

The rate of adoption and the long term sustainability of new sales capabilities can be impacted or enhanced by discovering the change disabling or enabling behaviours. The goal is to identify the change enabling behaviours and drive those to the extent that benefits to be derived from the integration of new sales behaviours may be fully realized.

To identify change enabling an organisations sales strategies and behaviours, it is important to understand:

• What are the drivers for the change within the context of the 'vision' of the organisation?
  
• Are there any competiting agendas in the organisation that may impede the successful embedding of new sales behaviours?
  
• Is the organisational culture ready to accommodate and support this type of change?
  
• Who will champion this change in a way that enables success? Decision making and influencing are critical to the role of sponsor and all senior C Suite executives need to support the strategy for change. Without buy-in there will be limited, non-sustainable outcomes.
  
• How will the Sales force be engaged and involved enough to see the value inherent in new ways of doing things, when they believe that the current way of doing things works just fine?
  
• What value would it bring to the individual, the team, the business unit and the organisation to succesfully embed this change? Change always has multilayered outcomes.
• How will that value be tracked and measured to show real returns on the investment after the deployment of the change program? How will you achieve your ROI.
  
• How will the sales team successfully utilise any new skills when the training is over and the targets remain? What support plans are in place.
• What support mechanisms are in place to assist with embedding new behaviours? How often do sales people revert to the old way of doing things because they hit a glitch?
  
• What planning is in place to move the sales team to another level after the initial changes in behaviour become embedded, where to then?
  

It is critical to note that when an organisation determines a new vision or goal, the strategy follows, the behaviours of the sales force shift, but are the rewards and performance plans reflective of that?

What steps have you taken to enable and support change within your organisations sales strategies?

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As recently as ten years ago, the biggest accounts tended to be the most profitable accounts. And the more attention they were given, the more profitable they were likely to be. However, we now live in an age where the old rules no longer apply. The most profitable accounts now may very well be the middle-sized accounts. “In fact,” says Neil, “your largest accounts may turn out to be a pain in the neck, requiring a lot of resources and squeezing you so hard on margins that you end up with razor-thin profits.

Mid-sized accounts, on the other hand, may occupy a space where the competition for their business is not so intense, and where higher margins are possible, and therefore offer greater potential for profitable business. Smart companies now are no longer ‘performing unnatural acts’ for clients just because of the size of the account. Instead, they’re looking at potential, profitability, and the ability to lock in revenue stream – and they’re discovering that their most valuable accounts, in terms of lifetime value, are not necessarily their largest accounts.”

There are two strategic questions here: First, how does an organisation deploy its most talented resources? Traditionally, top-performing sales reps have been assigned to the largest accounts. As we’ve seen, this may be a mistake. Second, most territory reps have a range of accounts: how can they best invest their time and energy? Sales managers often teach their people the “80/20” rule: 80 percent of the profit comes from 20 percent of your accounts. That can be a good rule of thumb, provided you don’t confuse large accounts with profitable accounts.

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Many companies believe that you shouldn't even mention the competition, in the belief that any negative talk boomerangs and damages the seller. This used to be a policy at IBM - no sales rep was allowed to mention any competitor or competing product by name at any point in the sales cycle. But Huthwaite’s research shows that top performing salespeople do talk about the competition... if the customer wants them to. Although they would not normally volunteer information about a competitor, if the customer asks them how their offering compares to a rival’s, they do not dodge the question.

The critical factor is how you talk about the competition. The best practice is to quickly shift the terms of the discussion from the competitor’s weaknesses to your strengths. When the customer says, “tell me about SlowCo’s machine,” the seller may be tempted to respond, “it’s one of the slowest machines on the market – 40 percent slower than ours.” But it would be better to reframe the answer like this: “SlowCo? Yes, our machine is 40 percent faster than theirs. In fact, our machine is one of the fastest on the market.”

A little-known, but very effective, tactic for talking about the competition is to highlight the generic weaknesses of the competitor’s offering rather than appearing critical of a specific company or product. Suppose, for example, that you are representing a small firm that is competing for a piece of business with one of the largest companies in the industry. “How do you compare to GiantCo?” the customer asks. Instead of responding that, “GiantCo is too big to give you personal service,” the skillful seller might say, “Well, there are a lot of differences between a large company and a small company. We’re a small company, so we’re able to give personal attention to each customer’s needs. As a company grows in size, it becomes more difficult to do that. Instead of being one of 50 customers, you’re now one of 5,000 customers.” Successful salespeople attack the competition all the time – but they do it in a way that does not reflect negatively on their own organisation.

How Major Sales are Really Made:

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This is a common complaint that we hear from sales leaders. The reality is that they haven't gone anywhere. It's their client-base that has changed, and sales reps are still selling using the outdated skills and tactics that helped them to high levels of success.

For example, in response to a near empty pipeline a sales leaders at a Fortune 50 global software company urged their sales reps to "move up the client's value chain" and "sell value." The intent was for salespeople to start having business-based conversations with executive-level buyers rather than with technical buyers in the IT department. But in an off-the-record conversation, a state sales manager said, "that sounds great, but the problem for us is that those people don't want to talk about software." The sales force was adept at selling on the basis of product features, but could not offer insights into the business issues that executives cared about. Mandating a change in selling strategy is a futile exercise unless reps are trained to sell differently. The source of the pipeline problem was easy to trace: The company's clients were asking the 2009 questions and they were decreasing their IT spending as a result. But only a few perceptive managers realised that the selling approach used by the sales force was making the problem exponentially worse.

Huthwaite's work with this company began with the heads of each line of business and the regional marketing team. We helped them arrive at new value propositions that are relevant to senior level buyers in today's economy. Our next step will be to provide the sales force with the necessary skills to use these new value propositions to engage the interest of executive level buyers.

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