FEATURE | MANAGING CHANGE
KNOCKING HEADS TOGETHER CHRIS WHYATT considers how to achieve successful sales change
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hange is an ever-present business theme, especially around sales. But, if you Google “what percentage of change initiatives fail?”, the answer is 70%. Many newly-appointed sales directors feel compelled to change strategy, and to do it quickly, but with a reported average time-in-role of 18 months, many are failing. Over many years, I’ve learned that successful change is only achieved when the people it affects buy in to the programme and the outcomes. Sales is full of people with diverse opinions and strong wills, so buy-in is vital. Sales leaders sometimes believe that buy-in is achieved by imposing the programme and outcomes they created in splendid isolation, without consultation with those affected. This can cause people to resist or disengage, driven by their lack of belief in the programme, or in the underlying reasons for the change. HOW TO ACHIEVE BUY-IN For the past 20 years, every successful change initiative I’ve driven started by harnessing the collective wisdom of those likely to be affected by it. The act of asking for, acknowledging, and acting upon, their contribution clearly sent out the message, “We value your opinion and we value you,” creating that all-important buy-in, and delivering a surge in discretionary effort. I first used this approach 20 years ago, when I inherited an “at risk” account and a team of more than 50 people. I immediately realised that we were not in good shape, and that urgent changes were needed, but was unsure where to start. I got all 50 people together for the evening (with free beer and food) and harnessed their collective wisdom, which added up to some 200 person-years on the account, to identify the issues and ways to turn the account around. This exercise highlighted that the customer didn’t recognise the value we were delivering, and that we had stopped listening to them. We had also become too subservient to them, afraid to push back on “opportunities” that represented bad business for us. We worked with the customer to agree better ways to communicate, pushed back on a few things, and undertook a marketing
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campaign that emphasised the positives in our relationship. Eighteen months later we won sole supplier status. None of this could have been achieved without the invaluable input and complete buy-in from the account team. WHAT THIS APPROACH HIGHLIGHTS AND DELIVERS In the 17 years that I’ve delivered consultancy using this approach, a few themes have emerged – and remember, these themes are driven by the people involved, not my opinions. As you would expect, continual opportunity qualification is frequently in the top three “need to do better” list, as is a win strategy for must-win deals. The number one shortcoming is unsurprisingly “review, learn and adapt from success and failure”, which rarely scores better that 35%, accompanied by comments along the lines of “we lost on price, let’s move on” and “who cares why we won, let’s move on”. So many important lessons are lost forever. If just one significant win and loss were to be analysed annually, and the lessons applied, the savings made by losing quicker, and the revenue “Successful change gained by just one more win, would is only achieved make a big difference. when the people it A prime example of this was a mobile services provider, whose affects buy in to the sales team collectively identified programme and the that deals won or lost were outcomes” categorised as just that, and never discussed again. I worked with the team to define the information needed to provide usable data, and its CRM system was changed with immediate effect. The new information was mandated for the previous six months of pipeline, and the weekly pipeline review started by spending the first 30 minutes considering all deals won and lost in the previous week. Within weeks, things that had previously been blockers were overcome (hindsight is 20/20 vision), and the ability to either qualify out or develop an informed win strategy was greatly improved. Revenue increased and cost of sale was reduced. This approach also works in the indirect channel sales arena. A few years ago, we worked with McAfee to identify improvements that drove ISMPROFESSIONAL.COM
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