Looking down the barrel of a major sales transformation makes most sales leaders nervous about pulling the trigger, with good reason. The odds are stacked against you. When John Kotter published his bookLeading Change in 1996, he revealed research showing that only 30% of change initiatives within organisations succeeded.

After the book’s release, numerous studies and articles have attempted to address the elusive formula for adopting successful organisational change. Yet, some years later, a McKinsey survey of 3,199 executives revealed the same startling results — only one transformation in three succeeds.

So the question remains, “Why do so many change initiatives continue to fail miserably?” Even more importantly, “What can sales organisations do to shift the odds in their favor?”

First, it’s important to understand that the prescription for lasting sales transformation comes in the form of a process, not an event. Sales transformation advances through many stages that build on one another. This process generally takes a commitment of many months, if not years to reach its ultimate level of maturity and impact.

Second, it’s important to understand that successfully implementing change in your organisation requires that every member of your sales team be equipped with building blocks that support behaviour change and nurture successful adoption.

1) Your vision: Sales leadership must paint a compelling story which engages your sales team to see the point in change and agree with it.

2) Role Modelling: Sales leadership and managers should take actions that role model the desired change and mobilise other “influencers” to drive change deep into the organisation.

3) Reinforcing Mechanisms: Systems, processes and incentives should be integrated to encourage and support new behaviours.

4) Skills and Capabilities: Each member of the sales team should be equipped with the skills and capabilities required to make the desired changes.

Priority – Sense Of Urgency

A successful transformation initiative begins with leadership determining that the change is necessary and good. Their involvement, and the perceived commitment to or lack thereof will set the tone for change and the adoption of new behaviours. A critical success factor for change includes a commitment from leadership that this initiative is one of the critical few, high-value sales activities prioritised for the sales organisation.

Beginning at the design and development phase of the initiative, the leader establishes the priority by focusing on timely review and approval of deliverables and participating in the completion of key milestones. Following this with active participation in training on new methodologies and full engagement in learning alongside sales teams is the clearest manifestation of priority. These actions gain buy-in from members of sales management and expand that buy-in throughout the sales organisation.

Starting the day after the initial training event, priority must be sustained. The transformation priority is best manifested when leadership identifies and sustains focus on the primary factors influencing the initiative. The foundation for success is in place when the entire sales organisation understands that the priority is achieving excellence in the new behaviours and celebrating the resulting successes.

Relevance

Throughout your sales transformation, different motivations are at play, and different actions will be required on the part of individuals and teams to successfully move through the phases of change. Make sure you understand and consider these key motivators within your organisation.

  1. Your Organisation’s Culture – It’s an unspoken voice in every organisation—but one that speaks volumes, nevertheless. It can either encourage or hinder individual empowerment, which drives a person’s capacity to take professional risks.
  2. Your Organisation’s Leadership – Smart employees pay attention to how leadership behaves. They are also pretty astute at predicting the attention span that leaders have for any particular adoption initiative. Leaders are responsible for embedding key concepts into the workplace and acting to ensure their placement is strong, consistent and secure.
  3. Your Organisation’s Front-Line Management – Sales managers have the ability to transform thinking and strategy into tactics and actions with sales reps who directly interface with your current and prospective customers. If sales managers aren’t aligned with the new selling methods being developed, the odds diminish for a meaningful change to occur.
  4. Your Organisation’s Sustained Level of Effort – Adoption of new initiatives generally takes a year or more. A focused and sustained effort and the fostering of reasonable expectations is required to achieve organisational expertise and effectiveness.

Enlisting the power of compelling motivation within employees and managers produces an action engine that is otherwise unavailable.  Integrate relevance by engaging and expanding in the following ways to ensure that your action engineis aimed down the right path.

Engage

Engage members in the design and development of the initiative and execution process. Being part of making decisions creates a much greater sense of ownership and commitment to the outcome. A famous behavioural experiment using lottery numbers makes this point. In the experiment, half the participants were randomly assigned lottery ticket numbers. The other half was asked to choose their own lottery numbers. Just before the drawing for the winning numbers, researchers offered to buy back the tickets from their holders. The result? Those that were allowed to choose their own lottery ticket numbers asked to be paid almost five times more than those who were randomly assigned their numbers.

Expand

Make sure your transformation vision speaks to areas that impact employee’s motivational triggers including community, family, customer, company, team and self. Attach outcomes of the initiative to as many of these impact areas as possible. After painting your vision, allow others to expand on it. Certainly, the story needs to be communicated, but much of the energy invested in communicating the story may be better spent listening to others and letting them add their perspectives. Empowering people to create and tell their own success story creates a “relevancy multiplier.” By allowing your change-related story to be shaped by others, you’ll yield a greater return than you would have by creating the story for them.

During your sales transformation, expect changes. Motives may change. Conditions may change. Therefore; relevance will change. Refreshing your concepts and adapting to changes within your environment will help you maintain relevance throughout your initiative.

Integration

Integration is crucial in four respects: (1) within the lives of individuals as mentioned above, (2) through a holistic view of the disciplines required to successfully execute work, (3) with processes, tools and technology supporting execution of the work, and (4) across, between and within organisations.

Integration will be necessary for blending in new required roles and responsibilities to support needed changes in the organisation. Ensure your tools and processes are sales consumable and don’t put an undue administrative burden on your sales managers and teams. Sales reps need to see your transformation process and tools as a mechanism for enhancing productivity instead of an additional administrative task to support the change.

 A holistic and well-integrated approach to key sales disciplines steer your team’s performance. Integration within and among these key disciplines will drive critical success.

Your Sales Talent

It’s important to give managers the ability to pinpoint the desired characteristics and performance potential of each key player on their team. By defining what success looks like in a sales role at your company and integrating that definition into a profile for success, you can identify the DNA of your perfect sellers. This will give you the talent pool you need to excel in implementing your sales plan.

Your Sales Plan

Your sales planning process ultimately drives your sellers to the right opportunities. How your sales organisation operates, your management operating rhythm, is fuelled by an integrated set of processes and tools that provide a clear line of sight into your sales operations.

Your Sales Execution

Your approach to sales execution should be integrated to leverage your plan. In addition to integrating your own sales disciplines, consider integration with your customers by aligning your sales process with the customer’s buying process. Sales execution is also bolstered by a common sales language used consistently by the sales force. This creates a platform to leverage key sales messages in the customer conversation.

Your Sales Messaging

The language you speak face-to-face with a customer must focus first on uncovering customer needs, then on articulating your value. Best-in-class companies develop a sales messaging framework to help sellers integrate key messages into the sales conversation.

Integration involves supporting and related organisations such as marketing, product development, customer support and technology, as well as the extended organisations of alliances, channels and partners. Alignment with and active engagement by these organisations provides leverage and reinforcement for change.

MEASUREMENT

Behavioural and business measurements are each integral to your initiative. When done well, these measurements provide key performance indicators of adoption success, providing insight into progress and challenges.  A qualitative assessment will help gauge the fluency of desired behaviours throughout your sales transformation process. It’s important to begin with a historical perspective.

Assessing Your History – As you consider your team’s readiness for sales transformation, it’s helpful to identify what you think your team’s main challenges will be during the process, and then develop a plan to address them. It may not be pleasant, but it’s necessary to acknowledge any “skeletons in your closet” that may be associated with lackluster results from previous change initiatives. Assessing the answers to these tough questions early in the process will help you identify conflicts and set priorities:

  • How successful were past sales enablement projects?
  • Why were some more successful than others?
  • How do recent organizational changes align with this project?
  • How do recent executive changes align with this project?

Assessing Your Priorities – As a leader, you’ll make assumptions about who should lead the change effort, what needs to be changed and how it’s going to be done. If your organisation has competing priorities, none of those assumptions will be correct. It’s critical to take time to assess where this initiative stands on the list of other organisational priorities.

  • What are your critical few corporate priorities?
  • What is the priority of this project compared to other corporate initiatives?
  • If it’s a million dollar baby – Whose baby is it?
  • What other sales enablement initiatives will be competing for this project’s critical resources?

Assessing the Ongoing Process – The better the adoption plan is executed, the greater its effect on sales growth. From the word “go,” team members must understand the desired behaviours expected of them and be given the tools and training to facilitate change. Examine these elements to determine if the team has the ammunition they need:

  • How engaged are senior leaders in the major project events?
  • What are the success metrics that will be measured and reported to support adoption?
  • What is the plan for owning, adopting and sustaining the deliverables from the project?
  • How is the project being communicated to those it will impact?

Assessing a Successful Execution – Once trained, hands-on experience, trial and error, and success and failure will eventually lead your sales organisation to a place of operational fluency and adaptation. You should begin to see most of your sales team experience a productive use of the new methodologies. Champions and mentors should surface during this phase and help continue the momentum. Assess the following questions to determine how your adoption efforts are progressing.

  • How well are managers reinforcing (inspecting and coaching) the processes?
  • How are success stories being gathered, documented, communicated and rewarded?
  • How are the project success metrics being tracked and reported?
  • How has the initiative adapted to challenges exposed in assessments?

REINFORCEMENT

Reinforcing new behaviours in each individual requires understanding the impact that your sales transformation is having on members of your team and looking at that impact through two very distinct lenses. The first lens allows you to gauge an individual’s ability to apply the new concepts of change. The second lens allows you to gauge an individual’s willingness to apply the new behaviors. These two lenses can be compared in what is called the Skill/Will Model.

The Skill/Will Model is comprised of four levels — defined by a Y-axis of Skill and an X-axis of Will. “Skill” is an individual’s ability to apply the concepts. “Will” is the individual’s motivation to apply the concepts.

The Skill/Will Model is comprised of four levels — defined by a Y-axis of Skill and an X-axis of Will. “Skill” is an individual’s ability to apply the concepts. “Will” is the individual’s motivation to apply the concepts.

Level I represents someone with Low Skill and Low Will

Level II represents those with High Skill but Low Will

Level III represents those with Low Skill but High Will, and

Level IV represents those with High Skill and High Will

A common mistake many organisations make is to treat all team members the same during a sales transformation. Different motivations are at play and different actions will be required on the part of individuals and teams to successfully move through your sales transformation.

Fortunately, a major sales initiative presents a perfect opportunity to coach and develop your team. Once you understand where each team member is on the Skill/Will Model, your next step is to coach him or her accordingly. Four key steps are required in an effective coaching model – Tell, Show, Observe and Feedback.

Tell – The Gallup Organisation conducted a large research study to determine what the most talented employees need from their workplace. At the top of the list was “to know what’s expected of me at work.” Setting clear expectations, especially in a time of change, is fundamental to maintaining high performance. In coaching, make sure you clearly explain what new behaviours you’ll be expecting.

Show – Demonstrating the skills you want your sales team to adopt throughout the transition will encourage new behaviours and skill development. Show your team how to do what you told them to do. Lead by example and model the behaviours that you’re asking them to adopt.

Observe – Many managers often struggle with the concept of effectively observing the performance of their team members. Yet, observing is a critical step throughout the learning process. Great observational managers usually categorise their observations and discussions with their sales team this way:

  • Behaviours that need to be praised, recognised and encouraged
  • Behaviours that need to be started or “added to” because something is missing
  • Behaviours that need to be changed or improved
  • Behaviours that are wrong and need to be stopped.

Feedback – The final step is to provide feedback on how well the performance you observed aligns with the expectations you set and the behaviours you demonstrated. Focus front-line leaders on inspecting, coaching, remediating and mentoring. Embed behavioural checklists into review sessions to aid successful adoption among sales managers and reps. Pursue good coaching opportunities and you’ll advance changes in behaviour.

SUSTAINING ADOPTION SUCCESS

The purpose of change is to create an asset that did not exist before. Without an aptitude for adoption, a sales transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing and incompatible projects taking the organisation in the wrong direction, or nowhere at all. It’s a long-range target, but success is attainable and desirable. Creating a long-term capacity for adoption success requires a new level of understanding, planning and persistence. Leaders who know the way, go the way and show the way ultimately experience transformative success.