Sales forces are hierarchical beasts, right? The Sales Director is King, divisional/ state managers are princes and the serfs know their place. Sales people like strong leadership, they like to know their bosses have a vision, they like the army to be marching in step. It’s a battle out there and a military style gets results.

That’s fine until it doesn’t work. The king is deposed, the princes get hints that their local fiefdoms may not be the best organisational option, the troops are told there’s no bonus this year and we’ll be lifting the bar on how you achieve it next year.

Strategy Consultants are called in to write the damning report that legitimises all of this, and, being those sort of consultants (“We don’t seek to implement our recommendations, so you can trust our objectivity”), they walk away leaving everyone wondering how to put their fine sounding words into action.

“Shall we train them?” says the HR Manager.

“Not until we get the systems sorted, and sales is way back in the queue” says IT.

“Let’s put a brief cut” says the GM.

“Not another one of those briefs”, says the consultant who received it with a week to respond.

But, consultants don’t like to walk away from work, being gun salespeople at heart. So let’s tell the truth….

Keep it simple.

Their own people are the only ones who can fix this in a way that stays fixed.

And so it was. The Sales Managers and their teams got the job. “Show us how to fix it – use the consultants for ideas on how to get there faster, but keep them in their place.”

60 ideas on what to fix (and how) became six projects, each with a four week time frame, with self-imposed, week by week milestones.

The Queensland team designed the organisation structure and wrote the job descriptions and success profiles.

The NSW team polished the value propositions and sales strategy and hired contractors to produce a whole new suite of sales aids.

The WA team figured out how to decongest the work flows.

The Victorian team redesigned the Key Account Management process and tied it into the customer online database.

The SA team did the same for the sales process.

The internal project office did the flow charts, provided resources on demand and generally helped out.

The Managers’ informal network provided the cohesion. Meetings were at local team level, with consultants occasionally invited to attend. The consultants’ main role was to keep up with the pace and design the fast start, implementation training program.

It came together in half the time that the consultants envisaged, because the team was fully engaged in creating its own future. The State Managers knew their jobs would be redundant 6 months down the track, but mentored their teams brilliantly. The Sales Managers knew it might be a one-off opportunity to build their own future success model. The sales people soon got over their initial shock (“We’ve been telling you this stuff for years….how come you’re listening now?”) specified their needs and created their own working tools. And, it all happened before the new Sales Director was anointed, just in case he or she had quite different ideas.

The three months of launch training was seamless because the teams owned the process and the only issue was “How do we make it work for us?” They even exceeded budgets during the six months of the project before the new organisation, strategy, systems and communication tools were fully functional, because the idea of driving change was more powerful than the process.

The learnings are simple. Sales people can articulate problems and solutions – they do it for customers daily. Smart management recognises that and leverages their ideas, ownership and commitment.

John Sergeant

John Sergeant is Principal of JSA, a sales effectiveness consultancy that believes its clients should do all the hard work.

Phone: 02 9972 9900
Email: john@jsasolutions.com
Web: www.jsasolutions.com