Change is often synonymous with risk for sales organizations. However, it can play a key role in their evolution and performance, provided it is well managed. And even if change management can be radical in some respects, it can also prove necessary to develop a company’s sales activity—or even save it from a crisis.
Discover the three rules to follow to drive change within your sales organization.
Combatting Stagnation through Change
Change management within an organization can be justified by the stagnation of its sales performance. Your employees can find themselves stuck in rigid practices, or even outdated methods, under the pretext that “it worked well in the past”.
Outdated sales processes inhibit the creativity and innovation potential of your sales team. They encourage the emergence of bad habits and can even make you lose many customers—whose needs and expectations are evolving faster and faster.
The rule: don’t hesitate to break down silos and restructure your sales organization if you feel it’s starting to stagnate. Reorganize it around a comprehensive vision, broader than simple financial objectives. This way, you will give new meaning to your sales representatives’ mission while boosting their motivation.
Combatting Dispersion through Change
The development of a sales organization can lead it to become dispersed. Your sales forces may then get lost in pursuing objectives that are both too general and too specific. Dispersion can also result in a loss of engagement that can be costly—up to 550 billion dollars per year in the United States alone.
A dispersed sales organization will prevent you from adopting an effective management style. Overly varied objectives will be difficult to coordinate, as well as to analyze and therefore to achieve.
The rule: restructure your sales organization, even if it means a strict separation between its different entities! If it seems to you that two sales forces are pursuing objectives that are too different, separate them completely by forming two distinct organizations. This is the approach taken by Larry Page, founder of Google and more recently, Alphabet : by dividing his company’s organization into several entities, he made it easier to manage.
Facing a Crisis through Change
A sales organization may face an unprecedented crisis. This is what happened in the 1970s with the oil crisis, which affected many transport companies—starting with British Airways.
These periods of crisis should lead you to identify processes that do not create any added value for your company and its customers. They should also lead you to modernize these processes, but the price to pay can be high: in the case of British Airways, several thousand employees had to be laid off to restart operations.
While this type of decision is never easy for a manager to make, it can be prepared beforehand through significant communication efforts, both internally and externally.
Change is prepared to be conducted under the best possible conditions; transparent communication, clear explanations about the new direction to take will help you get it accepted by your entire sales organization.
Download your white paper: Towards Agile Management!