How to Make Your Sales Transformation Initiative Relevant

There are several factors that will help predict the success of a sales initiative rollout. Best-in-class sales organizations take a systematic and multi-faceted approach to reinforcement and adoption. One of the most important components is to ensure the transformation initiative is relevant to the people who are leading and participating in the effort.

Throughout your sales transformation, different motivations are at play, and different actions will be required on the part of individuals and teams to successfully move through the phases of change. Understanding these key motivators within your organization will help drive relevance.

Your Organization’s Culture

It’s an unspoken voice in every organization—but one that speaks volumes, nevertheless. It can either encourage or hinder individual empowerment, which drives a person’s capacity to take professional risks.

Your Organization’s Leadership

Smart employees pay attention to how leadership behaves. They are also pretty astute at predicting the attention span that leaders have for any particular adoption initiative. Leaders are responsible for embedding key concepts into the workplace and acting to ensure their placement is strong, consistent and secure.

Your Organization’s Front-Line Management

Sales managers have the ability to transform thinking and strategy into tactics and actions with sales reps who directly interface with your current and prospective customers. If sales managers aren’t aligned with the new selling methods being developed, the odds diminish for a meaningful change to occur.

Your Organization’s Sustained Level of Effort

Adoption of new initiatives generally takes a year or more. A focused and sustained effort and the fostering of reasonable expectations is required to achieve organizational expertise and effectiveness.

ENGAGE

Motivating employees and managers produces an action engine that is otherwise unavailable. Integrate relevance by engaging and expanding in the following ways to ensure that your action engine is aimed down the right path.

Engage members in the design and development of the initiative and execution process. Being part of making decisions creates a greater sense of ownership and commitment to the outcome. Our Head of Product Development, Matt Jordan, walks through some best ways to involve your front -line managers in the creation of content in this podcast. It’s worth a listen.

EXPAND

Make sure your transformation vision speaks to areas that impact employee’s motivational triggers including community, family, customer, company, team and self. Attach outcomes of the initiative to as many of these impact areas as possible. After painting your vision, allow others to expand on it. Certainly, the story needs to be communicated, but much of the energy invested in communicating the story may be better spent listening to others and letting them add their perspectives. Empowering people to create and tell their own success stories creates a “relevancy multiplier.” By allowing your change-related story to be shaped by others, you’ll yield a greater return than you would have by creating the story for them.