My Experience with changes as a Sales Professional

If you’re a car racing fan you would know that there are instances whereby, due to the weather conditions or the strategy adopted by the team or the individual drivers, the drivers are subjected to a tactic or strategy which involves “change”. This change centres around a change of tyre, fuel, steering wheel, bumper etc. The ultimate goal for these tactics or strategies, which ultimately leads to a change, is for the drivers and the their teams to win the race.

As drivers, they have no choice but to adapt to the change, apply the right attitude and skill ( controlling what they can control ) and believe this change would help them succeed.

Some sales reps love change and others despise it, if you ask me, my response is that I embrace change and move with the change.

My life has seen me go through a lot of change. in fact, my wife and I recently undertook an exercise of counting how many times we’ve moved homes since our birth, mine was 17 times!

Can you imagine that? 17 times I’m having to restart, acclimatise with my new surrounding and build a new network of friends.

This post specifically relates to my experiences with changes that has happened within my sales profession, specifically in the areas below:

• Territory
• Teams/Colleagues
• Leadership
• Office location
• Role
• Organisation/Culture

In all the above, there are certain pre and post attitudes, skill and knowledge that we need to adopt in order to cope with the change.

Below are a few tips I’ve leveraged to help me adapt to the changes:

Territory:

As sales reps this is by far the worst change that could ever happen to us. Imagine you joined a company and built your business to the point whereby you are experiencing profound success( “feast time”). Suddenly, the new financial year (FY) begins and the entire sales organisation is subjected to a re-organisation and as part of that, new territories.

What do you do?

This is a real life example and I must say although I persevered and succeeded in the end, it mean I had to apply "Grit", perseverance and the believe that I will prevail until the end. Unless of course, you are the colleague who gains that edge and get handed the opportunities by virtue of the fact your new territory already had opportunities which was consequently handed over to you.

My 3 tips:

1. Firstly, always anticipate change, even during your "feast" time, this means when the change does happen it won’t hit you by surprise.
2. Secondly, ask the right questions to uncover the reasons for this change and what the perceived impacts are on the org, the team and you as the sales person.
3. Thirdly, view the change as an opportunity and cultivate a habit of open mindedness, and funny how the universe works, you will somehow find a way to be a success. Jim Collins, talks about this in his book “Good to Great” where he explains the “Stockdale Paradox” as follows

• Confront the brutal facts of your current reality.
• Never lose faith that you’ll prevail in the end.

Teams/Colleagues:

I find a complete change of teams very seldomly happen, and when it does it’s usually due to a re-organisation or individuals joining and leaving teams. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have changed teams due to promotions and change jobs.

Meeting new colleagues is something I love doing, getting to understand their journey, what makes them tick, the sales methodology they leverage and their goals for the next phase of their career. I’ve had mixed experiences here with the majority of the change being good and the rest not so much.

In every case, my learning points are:

1. Be open minded to meeting newer colleagues.
2. Be willing to adopt new team procedures.
3. Be committed to new team and support your colleagues where needed.

Leadership:

Changes at this level although we may be somewhat removed, does trickle down to the rep level and there is always an impact.

Leadership change could happen for a number of reasons, it’s more profound on us as reps, particularly, when we have built great working relationship with our VP’s, Directors or Managers and having to start all over again with the new leader.

Similar to the change in teams, I would like to share 3 tips which has helped immensely in my career to date.

1. Always build relationships with all your leaders, and not just your direct report. This makes it reasonably easier when there is a change
2. Always know your value and your worth, leaders love reps who have this self awareness and self mastery
3. Remember, different leaders have different ways of working but ultimately the same goal, which translates to revenue for the business. This means, as reps we should be prepared to adapt our way of working but not change our plan to deliver to our targets

Office location:

Certainly a change which we cannot control, again, organisations would have various reasons to support this change.

As sales reps, we do and should leverage technology such as audio and video conferencing. If we find the office location becomes an obstacle, we could look to negotiate a remote contract, provided this is available and you are eligible to apply for this.

The pre cursor to this is, you need to have an allocated section at home that would become your office, and cultivate a habit of being disciplined. Honestly speaking, I find I get a lot done when I work remotely, and I save on travel time which could also be invested into my other side hustles.

In summary:

• If your new location is inaccessible due to the distance, ask for a remote contract if available
• If you have flexibility within your role, you could look to work at a partners office that may be easily accessible
• Leverage technology such as zoom etc

Role:

I’ve always been in a sales role, and although I have changed roles( all within sales), the change of role here is specifically relating to moving from sales to marketing or a non “individual contributor role”.

Why would one want to make this change I hear you ask? Well, I’ve known some reps who have changed roles from sales to solutions architecture or vice versa. In most of these cases, the individual in question has an end goal and typically, wants to gain the experience working in the various roles.

My tips here are therefore sales related yet could still apply to other non sales roles;

1. Have an end goal in terms of why your are changing roles, if you were offered the role try to understand the potential for that role
2. As the saying goes, you can never reach your destination in a straight line. In addition to point 1 above, always be prepared to calibrate your plan and make changes to accommodate  the new role
3. Don’t ever doubt yourself, always reflect on your successes in previous roles and what it took to make you successful

Organisation & Culture:

Finally, this is certainly the change that affects everyone in the company and not just sales reps. Culture and organisational change takes a significant amount of time to be implemented and enforced.

Thinking back, I’ve worked for at least 4 companies who had a huge emphasis on culture. When done correctly, the results are invaluable. The entire DNA of the organisation is impacted in a positive way and ultimates this positive change is transferred and felt by the customers.

As sales reps, we tend not to immerse ourselves too immensely in this change, that said, it depends on where you are in your career and how receptive you are to this change.

Out of the 4 companies I mentioned above, 2 of the them were consistently voted for the “best places to work for award” which was primarily down to their great culture. I’ve summed up my 3 tips:

1. Firstly, understand the core values of the culture and apply this in all your sales engagements, you would be amazed at how this helps gain trust with clients and prospects
2. Secondly, where possible, always invite your prospects into your offices for them to feel this culture. This goes a long way in helping them distinguish your proposition from the rest
3. Thirdly, don’t pretend to live the culture but actually live it! Prospects and clients can separate the real from the fake

In addition to all the above we should always remember:

• Change is good
• We should be prepared for change
• We should embrace change

To our growth

Mike