BOOK REVIEWS
TRANSFORMERS
How do you transform your salesforce? MARC BEISHON finds two new books that help
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hanging a salesforce to be more effective is a hard task. Salespeople are tougher to convince and motivate than those in other departments, where in any case change can be nonnegotiable (such complying with regulation, although this can apply to sales too). A continual process of at least tweaking and at times fundamental transformation may be needed to keep up with the pace of change in the market. The first book we look at addresses the change and transformation challenges; the second looks at a critical part of the transformation agenda, namely sales development and how to orient the salesforce to build a better pipeline through the inbound/ outbound mix in a world where inside sales is becoming increasingly important. 7 STEPS TO SALES FORCE TRANSFORMATION This book takes the tried and tested method of presenting a number of steps, and seven doesn’t sound too scary for such a big task. It’s written by two people at Symmetrics Group, a US sales consultancy – the lead author is Warren Shiver and the firm’s founder. They kick off by addressing the challenges and defining sales transformation: “A holistic and multidimensional programme, one that touches on every part of the organisation, not just sales, and that fundamentally changes the way a salesforce sells.” It’s not about changing a lightbulb but rewiring the house and it’s hard – they note a McKinsey study that found that 75% of companies that attempted to transform to a solutions selling approach failed to
S E VE N STE PS TO SALES H EAVEN Drivers: The forces, events, and circumstances that can compel the need for a sales transformation. Vision: A definition of the desired future tailored to the needs and specific goals of the organisation. Case: A description of what’s required to build a case for change. Support: Sales transformations require support from other areas such as marketing, and from partners and customers. 40 WINNING EDGE
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Roadmap: strategy and structure, processes and tools, enablement and people, and metrics and management. Implement: How to launch your initiative – whether to roll it out as a comprehensive programme or as a pilot. Sustain: How to make the change “stick” through leadership, sales team training, communications, management tools, hiring etc.
produce a return on investment. The challenges are about “will” (the mindset of salespeople), their skills and also how the rest of the company works to help or hinder the sales transformation. But the first question is whether a transformation is needed or just some tweaks, which could be addressed by decent sales training, but if you want to switch to the kind of change promoted in The Challenger Sale, the authors say transformation will probably be needed, as consistently delivering insights “requires new value propositions, case studies and collateral from the marketing department, new competencies, skill development, recruiting profiles from HR, and alignment with operations to refine products and services”. And the way to do it is through a “top-down, systematic approach”, which is their seven steps that answer the what, why, who and how questions of the process. The authors talk about “levers” to pull that will ISMM.CO.UK
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