Focussing on the behaviour and approach of your sales leaders will generate fast and lasting results in your top line. Most likely, the investment you make will pay itself back in less than half a year. The key to success is to avoid over-complicating sales tools and processes and to identify and focus on the two to three behavioural changes that speed up your sales.
Do you have an ambition to improve your top-line results? If so, you are definitely not alone. Every chief sales officer, sales director, sales manager and sales rep go to work every morning with the purpose of increasing revenue growth.
Because of this, many spend a considerable amount of time and resources contemplating and trying to find good ways to achieve this goal. This frequently results in a myriad of initiatives, and most often, the initiatives are focussed on the commercial frontline, i.e. the sales reps and account managers who are doing the day-to-day sales operations. The initiatives often take the form of training programmes, revised sales scripts or maybe even a brand-new CRM system.
Short-lived improvements rarely deliver lasting impact
While these initiatives may provide some benefits to the commercial frontline, they are often short-lived. In other words, after a few months of optimism and some top-line effect, the commercial frontline is back to square one. Another month or two later, new initiatives are introduced – and the cycle starts all over. During the past 20 years, we at Implement have witnessed a multitude of these cycles take place across a variety of industries. Admittedly, we too have had the perception that this was probably the way to go.
Fortunately, we are wiser today.
Sales leadership holds the key to top-line growth
When we evaluated the more than 200 B2B companies that we have helped improve their sales force in the past 20 years, we noticed an interesting pattern. No matter the industry, sales methodology or CRM system applied, there is one thing which works every single time, and which also continues to work for years going forward: changing the behaviour of the sales leadership team.
Why does this work? One very simple answer is to look at change in the same way as one of our heroes, Professor Ralph Stacey from the University of Hertfordshire. He has put it very simply: if you want to change behaviour in an organisation, you need to change the conversations you are having. In other words: What are the topics of our conversations? What words are we using, and what do we emphasise? According to Stacey, leaders – and in your case, sales leaders – are instrumental in defining how we talk, the structure we apply to our conversations and the quality of them.