Change… Who Me?
By Peter Michie
Founder of The Performax Sales & Marketing Group Inc.,
experts in “change management” for sales and marketing organizations.
Published in The Plesman Report, May 1998
There’s nothing I like more than meeting with groups of sales
professionals and their managers to ask and understand their challenges
in meeting their sales targets. Their answers range from useful
real challenges, to the comical, and sometimes the absurd. For
example:
...“Customers just aren’t buying enough”
...“I really don’t like making sales calls“
...“The buyer wouldn’t meet with me”
...“We lost to a political decision”
...“Our company is too big/small, or too well known/unknown”
...“I couldn’t submit the proposal as our printer went down”
And, my personal favorite... “The more I sell, the more problems
I get”!
Yet in all my years of selling and managing sales teams, I’ve
rarely heard the words, “I need to change”. Why? Because
it’s easier to blame the company, the technology and the customer
than to take a hard look at the external forces at work and at
our individual and team responses to them.
For instance, we all know that:
Faster development and life cycles for new products and services
have led to rapid commoditization of existing products and services
– especially in the IT sector. As a result, margins erode quickly,
even on relatively new products.
The fiercely competitive global economy has increased the number
of competitors, and decreased pricing and margins for commodities.
Customers have become more educated, more price sensitive than
ever, and more demanding on their suppliers for different levels
of value.
But somewhere between understanding these truths and making
the changes necessary to accommodate them many sales people and
their organizations got lost.
So what can be done about it…...
Perhaps the first thing to do is to really understand the changes
in your markets and customers, and to diagnose the real problems
affecting sales;
Once these are understood, the second step involves a number
of key items…..
Re-examine and redefine your Company Mission and ensure you
have a Market Driven Strategy, versus a wish list.
Define and create a competitive sales Culture that supports
the Strategy by rewarding proactive, professional selling, and
punishes failure… at all levels.
A key component of this is a compensation plan that drives the
strategy to provide incentives for the right kinds of activities,
both individual and team.
Examine and possibly redesign your selling process and sales
models, eg: maybe you should not try to be selling directly at
all?
Train your managers and sales staff alike around the new selling
models, and put in place a Management System to allow them to
know whether they are succeeding, and/or where they need to improve…
e.g: based on tools & processes such as:
- Sales Planning
- Opportunity Tracking/Forecasting System
- Personal Success Checklists.
Continuously improve and raise skill levels within the selling
and management team.
Our experience is that, when change is needed, the last tool
mentioned (the Personal Success Checklist) is vital as, for each
person involved with selling, ie: sales professionals, sales managers
and sales executives alike, it defines the individual accountability
and focuses each person on their controllables, ie: the things
that lie within their control that affect their ability to sell
and succeed.
This focus will inevitably cause people to adopt a more open
attitude and accept that change in themselves must occur before
sales will improve, targets will be met and profits improve.
The time is past for excuses. Only those sales organizations
equipped with the vision and desire to change and keep changing
will find themselves driving profits to new heights in the next
century.
Peter Michie
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