Don’t be fooled by a fast-paced technological environment on the path to innovation. Change remains your sales reps’ pet peeve.
And if change most often leads to rejection, it’s because it means abandoning familiar routines and comforting habits. Methods that already worked. So, it’s up to you to convince your sales reps that change will enable them to perform better!
Sales Transformation: What’s its Purpose?
Even before driving change within your sales organization, you must determine the rationale behind your initiative.
Changing methods or processes requires time and personal investment, both for the manager and for their sales reps. You must therefore ensure that this change will be beneficial for your entire team and, overall, for your company.
Sales transformation can pursue several objectives:
- To test new sales processes (with the implementation of a new CRM, for example);
- To introduce a new sales enablement tool (such as social selling);
- To improve the quality of your relationships with your prospects, and especially with your strategic clients (with methods like lead scoring).
Once you have clearly defined the objective of the change you wish to implement, you will have to introduce it smoothly to your sales team.
How to Prepare your Team for Change?
If you impose it abruptly on your organization, the change will be rejected outright. You must allow your sales reps to adopt it and understand its benefits to be able to implement it under the best possible conditions.
Before introducing a new tool or a new process, start by asking your employees about their current methods. What challenges do they face? Would they be willing to change methods if these barriers could be overcome?
Take their answers into account, note their questions. There’s no need to organize a general meeting or individual interviews for this first step: informal discussions around the coffee machine, an email, or an online survey on the company’s internal network will be more than enough.
All the information gathered will enable you to manage the change smoothly, by focusing on your sales reps’ challenges.
When you start talking to them about the change you want to implement, you will thus be able to approach it from their perspective, and address their objections more easily.
Don’t just Lead the Change, be the Change!
Once your team is ready to embrace the change, you will need to help them adopt their new CRM or their new lead scoring methods.
Start by training them: some tools will require long training periods, while others can be covered during a meeting (or a micro-training session).
Involve your sales reps in driving the change, by identifying individuals who embrace it easily (they are rare, but you will find them if you are observant enough!) and by turning them into ambassadors for the new tool or method.
Also remember to formalize the new “best practices”, whether in a booklet, on a board displayed in the open space, or verbally at the beginning of your weekly meeting. Finally, don’t just lead the change: illustrate it by setting an example whenever you can!
Has your team finally accepted your new method, its new tool? Show them they made the right choice by evaluating the results and communicating them to the entire team. Prove to them, with supporting figures, that change is good!
To bring about change in your organization, adopt the new digital sales enablement tools