Building and Leading a Resilient Sales Organization

Leading a sales organization that hits its number repeatedly is a difficult and complex task. You are probably living with these intricacies right now – complex solutions, gaps in your sales team, multiple buyers, product/sales/services not on the same page – sound familiar? We’ve seen it time and time again. While these are common challenges, the solutions aren’t always as obvious. One of the key steps many companies miss is the importance of the buyer. It’s important that when you’re trying to boost sales performance, you don’t become too intrinsically focused on the internal sales process. It’s just as important (if not more) that you’re also considering the dynamics impacting your buyer. 

Your buyer's challenges may also be shifting or have changed due to COVID or the post-COVID world that’s fast approaching (hopefully). Right now, elite sales leaders are assessing their own sales organizations, but also ensuring they are building cross-functional alignment on how they can best serve their buyers. 

Consider these questions:

• How have your buyer's needs changed?
• Can you solve these new problems?
• What are your differentiators that align to your buyer’s new challenges?
• How are your salespeople equipped to articulate your value and differentiation as it relates to these new challenges?

You may be equipped to address these new challenges, but those capabilities may not have been articulated to your customers. They may not know how well you can do it, or why you can do it better than the competitors they’re already considering. Your sales reps’ ability to articulate current buyer value and comparative differentiators is directly related to improving sales performance. 

One of the most basic things you can do as a sales organization is ensure that you are aligned cross-functionally on the key value and differentiation of your solution. Too often, sales initiatives are implemented with a sales-only approach. On the surface, it makes sense. If you want to change behavior on your sales team, train the sales team. But, these initiatives fall flat because there’s too much focus on the internal operation of the sales team and not enough on the buyer. As a result, they fail to account for buyer needs and outcomes, which is the driving force behind sales performance. 

They also fail to consider how other departments influence and interact with your prospects and customers. These sales-only initiatives may see individual success or even team success, but the overall company transformation never happens. Sales may be engaging with the buyer one way, but other departments are pushing inconsistent or even contradictory messages. The reinforcement process breaks down because the seller reverts to old behavior reinforced by others’ actions.

Organizational alignment on buyer needs and value is a critical step to embedding new methodologies and processes into your salespeople’s daily routines. Your teams will maintain their current status quo, if desired changes are not agreed upon, enforced, and valued from the top down and across your company. 

Don’t waste another quarter. Get Busy. 

During a webinar, my colleague Dave Davies and I spoke about the critical steps you need to take as a sales leader to foster a culture of alignment, as well as key steps in any sales initiative that will create lasting change in your sales organization. Watch it here.