. Seven of the key changes are
1. Digital Transformation of Sales Talent Development – Organisations that embrace new ways of sales force improvement and a continuous development mindset will build better, more agile sales organisations that can adapt to a rapidly changing business environment. Think differently about how you develop your sales talent and commit to doing things better. Don’t let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress. Any modern sales force development solution will have some issues, so choose a stable partner that is able and willing to continue to invest in building a world-class solution.
2. Modernising Sales Learning and Development Systems – Organisations want learning to enhance some specific capability of their people. As a result, we see the emergence of “off-LMS” learning technology that allows learning to be much more personalised. The corporate LMS might be a nice vehicle for managing organisation-wide assets for learning and development, but salespeople have different learning needs. Learning should be organised around specific capabilities of salespeople. Moreover, there should be some mechanism to assess salespeople to determine their current proficiency levels and the areas they should focus to move the needle. At any moment in time, a sales leader should be able to have a clear picture of capability within the sales organisation in the most important competencies.
3. Doubling Down on Sales Coaching – Companies want to improve their sales managers’ coaching skills, but many struggle to create a coaching culture. Establish formal expectations around coaching, and make it part of your culture. Improve your sales managers’ coaching skill, but also give them a process and a cadence against which to coach.
4. Matching Sales Training to Sales Training Needs – Many companies buy sales training transactionally and don’t do enough to drive the adoption and behaviour change necessary to achieve expected outcomes. Start small but do it right. Prove the approach for your company and then expand. Be sure to define the profile of a future successful salesperson. Start simple to address a couple of skills at a time with quantifiable measurement and progressively develop the team. Do not try to solve everything at once. Finally, think beyond a training class to a system for continuously developing and managing a sales team.
5. Making Learning More Efficient in a Time-pressed World – transition your thinking about sales training from an event that you do for a couple of days each year to a continuous development process that makes a sales rep the best they can be. Identify required competencies for a sales role, assess people to identify gaps and priorities, offer development activities, measure progress, and hold the rep and the manager accountable for progress. Finally, remember that creating effective development activities means more than taking a 2 or 3-day program and breaking it down into smaller chunks. Quality development involves some knowledge acquisition, but it requires a lot more practice, coaching, and real-life application.
6. Aligning Competencies with Strategy – Leaders should define their strategy clearly and identify what competencies are necessary to execute. Then to understand how their existing team stands on those competencies and identify any negative gaps. Connecting competencies to strategy is a great step, but the value depends in part on the value of those competencies. Often, organisations will have generic competency models in place for their sellers that could apply just as well to other functions in the organisation. You get even more value if you use competencies that are specific to the sales roles in your organisation.
7. Doubling Down on Investments to Retain and Grow Customers – Retaining and growing customers is more easily said than done. Landing a new customer requires effective marketing and sales teams, and a good product that is easy to use and delivers that value the customer expects. Retaining customers requires effective customer success management to help the customer drive adoption throughout their organisation and get a compelling return on the investment in the product. Growth requires building credibility and trust with the customer, and the skill to identify additional needs of the customer you can fulfil and secure the business. Growth is accomplished best through a team effort of account executives, subject matter experts, and customer success managers. Having a common account management process and sharp cross-selling and up-selling skills helps immensely.
The full eBook with perspectives and opinions from other SPI executives and consultants is available for download.