It’s no secret that we live in times of rapid and disruptive change. And yet, according to expert observers like Michael Rochelle, chief strategy officer and a principal analyst at Brandon Hall, sales team development practices have changed very little over the last two decades. “The sales training industry has not kept pace with the evolving needs of organizations,” Rochelle says. But new innovations are quickly emerging to accelerate sales transformation in novel and much more effective ways.
As executives adjust their organizations’ business strategy to stay competitive, their sales forces must also change to keep pace. However, getting people to change the way they sell and engage with customers is invariably very difficult. To get it right, and to provide the best odds of success, business leaders are now managing their sales team transformations in ten steps.
1. Establish buyer-centric sales processes.
Before you change how your people sell, first, understand how your customers buy. Many sales leaders acknowledge that buyer behavior in most markets has changed significantly over the last few years but don’t really know how it has changed. Do your research, and then re-design your major customer-facing processes to include practices that enhance the buyer experience and give your sellers a competitive edge. These process definitions establish ideal selling standards, which makes it much easier to scale, reinforce and manage your sales improvement effort.
2. Clarify sales roles and responsibilities.
When sales strategy and processes change, you must re-align the selling resources needed to execute these new processes effectively and efficiently. Ideally, you want your most valuable resources focused on doing the most valuable work. Usually, this means modifying your organization chart and re-writing job descriptions. Everyone must know what they need to do, when they need to do it and how to hand off work to others at logical points in the process.
3. Establish competency models for each role.
Once you know what you need your people to do, then you can determine the factors that drive success in each role. These factors are known as competencies and are usually either knowledge- or behavior-based—what people must know and do to succeed. Then, establish minimum and desired levels of competency. When possible, the competencies should be learnable and teachable, so they can be used to support employee selection and development activities.
4. Assess incumbents and candidates against the competency model.
Once you’ve established competency models for each role, you can assess incumbents and prospective hires against these models to determine job fit and developmental needs. If people don’t fit, consider re-deploying them to another role or moving them out of the business altogether. If they fit but are not yet at a sufficient competency level, assign relevant and specific development and coaching activities to address identified gaps.
5. Create role-based development plans.
Assessments identify and prioritize developmental needs for your salespeople. They form the basis for role-based development plans to bring each rep to the desired competency levels. These plans enable each salesperson and his or her manager to agree on priorities and stay focused on the development activities that matter most.
6. Offer diverse developmental activities.
Companies with a full development curriculum aligned with its competency models have a competitive advantage. Too often, companies prescribe training that isn’t needed, or the training that is needed isn’t available. This is wasteful and breeds cynicism. Additionally, every training experience needs to build measurable and observable competence. In sales, this means acquiring relevant knowledge, skills and situational fluency. It takes more than just watching videos; it requires practice, application, coaching, repetition and hard work.
7. Provide coaching.
Coaching helps learners build competence and mastery of important skills, removes impediments to success, and provides motivation during good times and bad. Sales managers must be both willing and able to coach their people. Coaching is more effective when sales managers have defined sales processes to coach against, criteria to focus attention on the most important activities and a set cadence to ensure that coaching happens on a regular basis.
8. Provide enablement and performance support tools.
Enablement tools help salespeople apply new skills with more confidence and reduce the frustrations associated with working differently. Commonly, there are disconnects between what is learned and how that learning is applied on the job. As salespeople learn new skills and methods, they should also learn to execute them using practical tools designed for this purpose. Providing these tools creates a more realistic learning experience and greater, faster impact.
9. Measure outcomes.
Measurement strongly influences behavior change. If you don’t measure results, then you lose an important lever to hold learners and managers accountable and to determine if training is making a business impact. If training isn’t achieving the desired results, then you have an opportunity to make proactive course corrections so that it can.
10. Provide leadership visibility.
Leaders who lack insight into the state of talent in their organization have difficulty holding their managers accountable for reinforcing new skills and the methods they want the field to adopt. However, when leaders have visibility, they not only drive greater accountability, but they also know with greater certainty how quickly change is happening. This knowledge gives them better foresight to make necessary adjustments proactively.
With this 10-step process, business leaders can greatly accelerate the alignment of their selling resources to changes in company strategy, and more cost effectively, too. As a result, they can be much more confident in the sales force’s ability to produce the desired business results.
