Transforming sales for 2021

SO I was asked a very important question by the readership audience in business — 2021 is a few weeks away, we need to transform our sales, is it possible? My response — Nothing is impossible if the business understands what it wants to achieve. Business growth often comes from internal changes. While these changes are positive and aid in business development, internal teams can sometimes struggle to adapt to new strategies after years of the same processes.

As a sales leader, you know how important it is for your sales teams to be ready and adapt to change as it comes. This is important since sales performance is often a critical factor in determining how businesses can grow.

Because of this, understand how to lead your team through periods of transformation and equip them with the tools they need.

What is transformation in sales . . .

If you watched the “Transformers” sequel of movies you will agree, the ability to adapt in any environment, business for that matter is key. Sales transformation is the process of building, updating, and thrusting the sales operations which are usually inspired by an overall company desire to achieve specific goals or objectives that are significantly impacted by the sales process, like increasing revenue.

A sales team’s transformation strategy is led and created by a sales manager. They work with salespeople to ensure they have the information and tools needed to succeed and execute a successful sales transformation that meets intended end goals.

You can think of it like this: your business may have an overall goal of closing more deals and acquiring more customers per-quarter than before. This is the end goal that would require you to transform your sales process. As a sales leader, you’d work with your sales teams to revamp their current operations and give them the means to meet these overall goals. In this scenario, the transformation aspect is how your sales processes will change increase customer acquisition.

How to transform your sales process

Given that sales managers lead sales transformations, there are best practices for executing a successful sales transformation strategy that you can use to guide your team through periods of change.

Sell the need for change

As a sales leader, you’ve likely been informed by your superiors of company objectives that are requiring the need for a sales transformation.

If your sales process has been relatively consistent for years, salespeople are also probably confident in their current process and may be hesitant to adapt to a new, unfamiliar strategy.

Given this, “The biggest opportunity for sales transformation is the opportunity to sell the need for change before selling the solution.” While this can certainly be applied to selling product changes to individual customers, it works for salespeople as well. In practice, this means that the best practice for sales leaders is to first sell the reasons why changing your sales strategy is necessary before outlining the solutions and practices that will contribute to meeting desired outcomes.

Explain to salespeople why things need to change to meet business goals before beginning to outline how they’ll meet these goals. You’re guiding them through the process and making sure they understand instead of throwing them towards a strategy that they aren’t yet able to understand.

Identify areas for change Looking at data and reports to understand gaps in your own sales process helps you understand what needs to change. This helps map out a plan to close the gap.

Identifying gaps in your current sales process is of importance.

In brief, transforming your sales process shouldn’t mean overhaul your entire process and start from zero. Instead, the change should happen within your existing strategies by identifying current barriers to success.

You’ll want to take a deep dive into sales data and current processes to understand why this tier has low sales.

Outline your process with OKRs

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal-setting strategy that sales leaders use to help salespeople understand what they need to do to achieve certain results and contribute to meeting the overall collective goal of your transformation process.

Objectives are broken down into smaller measurable goals called key results, making it easier for salespeople to implement changes over time. So, if your end goal is to decrease the length of your standard sales cycle, that is your overall objective. Your key results can be measurable milestones, like reducing the cycle by X amount of days per quarter until the end of year (EOY) goal is met.

By creating this plan, you’ll uncover factors that may impact your sales strategy and your sales team’s successes in meeting all of their goals.

Align sales and marketing teams

Sales transformation success comes from aligning sales and marketing teams. Although sales transformation is focused on sales teams and their change strategies, other stakeholders can impact their success.

You can think of it like this: say that your sales transformation end goal is for your employees to become experts at selling your business’ marketing products in the tech sector when it launches and obtain 100 new users in the first six months.

This means your transformation process needs to help salespeople gain mastery of the information they need to sell the new product. Work with the marketing team to understand how they are going to be advertising the product and coordinate on the language they’ll use to sell to customers. If leads are hearing one thing from marketing and differently from sales, deals may fall through because customers are confused.

Continuing with the previous example, maybe they’re going to work with the product team that created the product to learn about how the product works and its benefits to new and existing customers.

In sum, without understanding all aspects of the updated tool, your salespeople may use the wrong selling points when communicating with customers. This impacts their ability to close deals and causes them to fall short on the end goal: having them be experts at positioning the new tool’s benefits to close deals with 100 new leads in the first six months.

Track progress over time

As with all sales processes, monitoring the success of your sales transformation goals over time gives you insight into what is working and helps you identify problem areas before falling short on overall goals.

If company executives have said that they’re hoping to raise revenue by 7 percent by EOY, this likely can’t happen all at once. If you’ve outlined OKRs, you’ve probably found that there are different steps you and your sales team will need to take to meet these goals. Tracking progress over time gives insight into how your overall team is adapting to the new changes.

Sales transformations can be complicated for salespeople, as there may be significant differences in their day-to-day tasks.