Assessing Readiness for Change in the Sales Organization

The typical sales organization conducts activities across the spectrum of marketing, selling, and fulfillment. Sales teams are often given goals that are loosely defined and difficult to measure:

• Drive revenue for the selling organization.
• Create and maintain successful client relationships.
• Build trust and loyalty with every client interaction.
• Capture more market share for the selling organization.
• Align the functional areas of selling to the vision and strategy of the selling organization.
• Maximize sales process efficiency.
• Maintain visibility and accountability through technology.

A solid understanding of professional selling competencies and an intentional process for developing those competencies can help salespeople set, understand, and exceed these goals, thus driving revenue and improving performance in your sales organization. But this is easier said than done. If your organization is like many others around the world, you have probably witnessed several shifts in how your organization approaches markets and buyers. These shifts make it more difficult to attain goals.

For example, your organization's selling efforts likely have shifted

• from an ad-hoc selling approach to a process-centric selling approach
• from a focus on a single-transaction decision to a focus on how buyers
• make specific decisions about value
• from product or service selling to solution-oriented or consultative selling
• from an understanding of the transaction experience to an understanding
• of the customer experience
• from hiring to fill a position to hiring for talent
• from opportunistic revenue results to strategic revenue generation.

All of these shifts require a balance between capacity and competence. While many managers strive for balance, success will depend on where your organization is and where it wants to go. So where should you start? The ASTD sales effectiveness levels can help you assess your organization's critical work-related outputs and how well these outputs support your sales goals. Each of the five levels builds upon the previous ones and is critical to striking the right balance between competence and capacity. It is important to note that these levels are not completely hierarchical. In other words, you can start building the higher levels before completing the build out of the prior one.

The levels are sales science, sales process, sales relationships, sales technology, and sales competence. As your organization progresses through the five levels, your understanding of the keys to world-class sales effectiveness will become clearer and more sophisticated. Assessing your organization against the sales effectiveness levels (see figure 7-1) will help you understand how well your organization balances capacity and competence to achieve desired results.

Level I: Sales science

It all starts with sales science: what you are doing. Your organization has probably spent a great deal of time defining its approaches, methodologies, and processes for selling. Your team has probably worked hard at finding out what buyers want. You have tried to teach salespeople how to sell by making a sales presentation, utilizing negotiation techniques, or leaving a compelling voice mail. To be effective, you had to stay focused on the transaction itself. By isolating the transaction as a specific moment in time, and building the "science" necessary to control as many variables as possible, you could tell new salespeople and sales managers what happened during the sale, why it happened, and how to avoid any missteps in the future. No matter how simple the product or complex the solution, your sales team needs to explain, teach, and influence.

Level II: Sales process

Once you understand what you are trying to do as a sales organization, it is time to define how. Your organization worked hard on fully understanding what occurs between buyer and seller within an individual transaction and, as a result, has probably completed more transactions. You then defined a unique series of repeatable steps that culminate in a transaction. By analyzing how sales work is accomplished, sales managers and salespeople are able to train better; facilitate transactions better; and, most important, understand what it takes to sell effectively. As products and solutions continue to become more complicated, the sales process must be in place to cope with the higher level of complexity.

Level III: Sales relationships

Once you have a sales process, it is time to focus on the relationship. Your organization probably has helped its salespeople shift from a transaction focus to a relationship focus. That change has had a dramatic eff ect on the salesperson's role, transforming it from simple order taker to strategic partner. Once that relationship was established, buyers broadened their focus beyond limited issues and needs. Th ey began looking for solutions to business problems, as opposed to purchasing products and services and managing their own implementation. Organizations began requiring more sophisticated back-office tracking of vendors as well as protecting shareholder value. As a result, salespeople began helping the buyer facilitate a buying decision - consultative selling. Salespeople were taught to become stronger problem solvers and to engage multiple stakeholders so that they were not subject to the whims of one decision maker. Other members of the sales team were brought into the transaction to guide the various steps of the decision process.

Level IV: Sales technology

Once you have solidly defined the science, standardized the process, and cultivated relationships for maximum influence, it is time to focus on technology. Your organization may have struggled to cope with the Internet boom and the increased use of technology to manage knowledge. Once sales processes were well defined and buyer behavior became well understood, organizations turned to technology to help speed up salesperson reaction times to market trends, keep them abreast of important industry news, and develop a more solid understanding of their buyers. Your sales team may have turned to personal computers and handheld devices to help them stay on top of the rapidly changing business world. You may have even rolled out a customer relationship management system or sales force automation tool in an attempt to understand and map the entire transaction experience of the buyer. Technology can help your organization understand the initial needs of the customer, help deliver and fulfill a product or service, or handle invoicing, all to create the best possible transaction experience.

Level V: Sales competence

With the firm foundation of science, process, relationship, and technology properly laid, it becomes time for the ongoing improvement of competence. Despite the myriad forces of change driving business today, understanding and consulting with buyers in pursuit of mutually beneficial solutions is still a relevant approach. The need continues for sales professionals to build and renew customer relationships, monitor and understand buyers' changing needs, and

deliver ongoing value. This approach is difficult to implement consistently in a dynamic, constantly changing sales environment, but success comes with a holistic understanding of salesperson competence. Because buyers are increasingly demanding unique answers to their unique problems, salespeople must be able to customize and personalize their own selling approaches. This requires deep understanding and advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Attaining all five levels of effectiveness for world-class selling requires buy-in and effort by multiple stakeholders. Whether you are a workplace learning and performance professional or an academic, a sales manager or a consultant, you can apply the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model to improve sales performance in your organization.