Rejuvenate Your Sales Culture

You Probably Can't do It Alone, So Why Not Collaborate For Success?

A longtime successful company suddenly found itself in crisis. As a result of a culture clash, combined with changes in the compensation plan, the value proposition, the product offering, and performance metrics, the sales force felt overwhelmed and was not executing as well as could be expected. The executive management team was under the gun to turnaround the situation and deliver results. Sound familiar?

Plan Your Attack
In the company in question, there was a performance gap between plan and actual. Future projections were expected to be below target. Acquisitions had provided the company with a robust product offering, but Sales was not able to articulate a good value proposition and convert opportunities into revenue.

Yet there was even more bad news. Weak sales managers were unable to build any bench strength, resulting in firings and layoffs. Additionally, there was no performance management system in place that inculcated a sense of ownership and accountability. As a result, many in the sales force felt a sense of entitlement, rather than a sense of urgency.

Aware that something urgent needed to be done---and fast, senior management decided to face their challenge head-on by prioritizing four significant goals.

1. Hire District Sales Managers who would be exemplars and cascade the right sales process down to the troops.

2. Communicate the strategic plan to Sales so that nothing was lost in the translation.

3. Identify what Sales needed in order to be able to successfully execute against plan.

4. Identify whom on the sales team had the aptitude and attitude to deliver results on time and on target.

But this was easier said than done.

Create a Vision
The executive management team felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge. They understood they could not accomplish this alone and asked us to help develop a road map so that:

• Sales managers will be exemplars who are able to cascade the solution focus down to the troops.

• Behavior will be aligned with corporate strategy and goals will be translated into operating reality.

• Salespeople's activities will be prioritized and directed toward achieving results that increase profitability and achieve sales growth.

• Capabilities will be converted into dollars by consistently articulating value justification to close new business and increase incremental business in the existing customer base.

• Improved organizational effectiveness will increase the amount of face time with customers, deepening account penetration and delivering consistent performance.

• Increased customer retention and loyalty will increase with the opportunity to extend capabilities and create annuity streams.

• Communications flow will be precise and predictable, so salespeople will know what to do and how to do it.

• Management will gain the ability to correlate current activities into future revenue and profit.

• The value of the time of salespeople and management will be optimized for better ROI.

Collaborate to Architect a Solution
Because of the complexity of the situation, company politics, and a sense of urgency, the executive team correctly knew that they needed third-party, objective expertise to maximize sales execution.

To this end,we collaborated to assess, recommend, develop and implement the processes and capabilities needed to achieve these significant changes. For example, in the first phase we interviewed a representative sample of the sales force, leveraging the power of a qualitative/quantitative technique.

This process helped us to identify obstacles, highlight frustrations, pinpoint weaknesses, and target areas for performance improvement. More importantly, this one-on-one approach created a relationship of trust and open, honest communication, while developing immediate "buy-in" from the team because they participated in the process. This was critical to future sales execution.

During this multiphase project, we worked with management to focus on the desired outcome and to communicate effectively with the troops, who expressed strong interest in receiving feedback. By using an open-ended, qualitative instrument and quantifying the data, our client got the best of both worlds - the range of responses with rich, deep input and the ability to rank-order results and see significant differences in both answers and interview characteristics.

Get the Results You're Looking For
And there are happy endings. Using our unique "qualitative/quantitative know-how" we were able to save time and reduce costs, aggravations, and risks for repeatable results. Feedback from the process was used to make improvements in sales management.

As one of the executives said, "Throughout the entire project, The Fenemore Group was insightful and engaging and was highly regarded by the people with whom they worked. Their experience and professionalism provided all the attributes necessary to bring about the outcome we were expecting."