Because of its emotional component, the sales organization is often vulnerable to faddish, silver bullet solutions—claiming that all you need is this new incentive plan or organizational structure.
But saying nothing more than "focus on the customer" is as crudely one-dimensional as saying "cut costs" or "improve effectiveness." The sayings gain value only when endowed with specific content.
How often have you heard about a sales force full of failures? Despite all sorts of management initiatives — revised incentive plans, software investments, new training programmes and account management processes — the sales numbers keep slipping. Nothing succeeds. The sales organization plays a crucial role in your company's relationship with its customers. So if customers refuse to buy from these salespeople, the situation comes to resemble that of a slumping football team: You can't fire the fans (or customers), so you fire the players and the person who deals with them directly — the coach.
Yet how often do these disgraced salespeople go on to succeed elsewhere? How often have the new employees, plugged into existing sales strategies, failed to reverse the decline? In short, how often has a sales organization been labelled the scapegoat for deeper strategic problems?
Failure is less likely to be the people in the sales organization than the design of their sales organization and how it is operated in many layers. How well is the sales organization linked to the business strategy and the execution plan that exists to ensure success.
Such failures can't be addressed by either a change in personnel or quick-fix tactics such as new incentive plans, training programmes or ad hoc software investments because new people and new tactics can still remain disconnected from strategic effectiveness. Instead, the root of the problem is the failure to align the sales organization to a business strategy that focuses on customer needs. Conversely, the route to sales success is business process reengineering focused on the company's strategic imperatives.
When we talk to companies about strategy and the sales organization, one of their biggest fears — and it's certainly justified — is failure. There is a lack of understanding in how intrinsic the strategy and its execution is linked to the sales success. The layers and processes that are required to build a highly effective sales organization that can deliver results through changing markets and retain a high level of competitiveness.
History and overly zealous marketing from single focused vendors has boxed sales organizations into believing the quick fix maybe a cure. Many organizations taking that path have learnt, at a very costly price, that the requirement goes deeper into the organization and its strategy. This book explains what the true requirements are and sets the benchmark for how sales organizations will operate in the future and is fast becoming the handbook of CEOs when seeking sales organization performance improvement.