Re-engineering the sales force

Many organisations are not highly differentiated through product or service and therefore must be differentiated through the quality of their sales force if they are to succeed. How do you create a sales force that is highly

All Sales Managers have a number of tools at their disposal to create this 'best of breed' sales force. The tools need to be properly integrated with other parts of the business, and particularly with HR processes and need to support the sales force at every point in achieving their goal, and in operating with complete clarity, commitment and accountability for what they deliver.

None of the tools is new. Most large businesses, and many smaller ones will have them in place already. The key to the re-engineering process is to take a long, hard look at each of them in turn, decide whether each is actually performing the function for which it was originally intended and designed, and whether it is working in alignment with all the other tools to produce the right results.

The tools of re-engineering:

• Job Profiles
• Competency Frameworks
• Incentive Plan
• Training Plan
• Generic Sales Force Performance Measures

For instance, Job Profiles, when carefully examined, are often found to be weak in specifying the very things which will lead to high levels of performance. They are frequently not well aligned to the organisation's sales competency framework – and often focus on activities and attributes that do not differentiate high performance from average.

Competency frameworks are often defined following a relatively meagre internal consultation process, with a lot of highly influential input from a few senior people, who are not used to differentiating between technical skills, behaviours, and personality traits. Competency frameworks should be very carefully examined against external best practice in the development of the framework itself, and in the way the competencies are defined and written, as well as being validated by research to prove that someone doing those things will actually produce a better performance than someone doing some other things.

Similarly, the incentive plan needs to reward the use of the competencies, while the training plan sets out to develop them. It is very common to find training devoted to the technical aspects of products, compliance where relevant, and the bureaucracy of the sale process (all of them vital, but none of them the whole story), and rewards focused entirely on the figures, whilst hard-pressed sales managers are being exhorted to spend their time coaching their teams in the competencies.

The difference between the vicious cycle and the virtuous circle in sales is alignment of the tools.

One other contextual factor is key - how the sales force is structured. The old adage that "Every organisation is perfectly designed to get the results it is achieving," is probably our best guide here.

The re-engineering process involves the following three stages:

Stage 1 - Analysis of the existing tools
The aim of making a thorough analysis of the existing tools is to identify key areas of inconsistency or incompleteness. It should result in a comprehensive report which then becomes the blueprint for success. This paves the way for a properly thought out consultation process which can include elements of Appreciative Inquiry to uncover hidden pockets of good practice, as well as elements of challenge to root out deeply embedded but unquestioned and unhelpful practices.

Stage 2 - Consultation
Typically consisting of interviews with key stakeholders, it is very important that this consultation process includes in-depth customer feedback, and gives equal weight to the views of people at different levels and in different parts of the organisation, other than the sales force itself. The object is to identify specific needs that appear not to be addressed and to test the implications of specific areas of inconsistency or incompleteness uncovered in Stage 1, the analysis of the existing tools

Stage 3 – The Re-Engineering Blueprint
The final report forms the blueprint for success going forwards by detailing everything that needs to be changed in order for all the tools to be doing their job properly, and all working harmoniously to the same end.

Typically, in sales organisations that are not delivering the results of which they might be capable, there are many more blockers at work than just the ability, or lack of it, of the individual sales people. Unless all of the Sales Managers' tools are properly designed for the job and perfectly aligned to one another, and to other organisational systems, then sales people will be working with the brakes on. The old advertising adage that "the large print giveth and the small print taketh away," can be re-interpreted for sales people as "the motivational conference giveth and the day-to-day operational realities taketh away."

Contact us for more information or tools for re-engineering your sales force.