Terry Turner is a veteran sales executive who has experienced changes in buying habits in three different industriesmanufacturing, supply chain, and now, education. He is currently senior vice president, sales and marketing, for Harcourt Assessments.«This was my third time transforming a sales force and each one has been different.
At Harcourt, the way the buyers buy in this industry had changed, but the sales force had not. Sales had been taking orders for existing clients on educational assessment tests and developing and informing clients about new products. The industry changed from sales to local school districts to highly competitive test adoptions for entire states a much more complex sale for higher stakes.
In the initial assessment, we knew we needed to change the selling culture from product-driven to sales to customer-experience-driven. We were more focused on protecting turf and guarding silos than on winning or building relationships with clients.
As Jim Collins says in Good to Great, we had to get the right people on the bus or where we were going didn't matter. And we also had to get some people off the bus. I knew to start with sales management to have the most immediate impact. If I hired new salespeople who went to work for managers selling the old way, we would get nowhere.
I replaced most of the front-line managers with people I knew from my network who shared the same values, sales process, and hiring profile. People who are cynical or indifferent about change will kill your efforts with passive resistance or poor attitudes.
The second step was to change our sales messaging to more accurately convey our strengths, benefits, and differentiators rather than features.
The third step was to redefine our sales process to give everyone a playbook defining what a good sales effort looked like and what questions, information, and action items were needed in each phase. This training gave the reps a roadmap for managing a complex sale and the managers a common set of expectations for selling and coaching.
We also changed our team structure, roles, and responsibilities. We are blessed with outstanding products and people who have a great deal of expertise in educational testing. Many of them came from client backgrounds. Teaming them with professional salespeople to lead the team has allowed us to leverage our talents by getting the right people owning the right parts of the sales cycle.
The fourth step was to start redefining and reinforcing a new culture for selling and servicing customers and building relationships. This impacted every division of the company, so I needed upper management's support to handle the inevitable power struggles. We also turned over around a dozen reps out of about a hundred who were unable to change or grow.
In the next year, we will focus on improving the foundation selling skills of discovery, linkage, presentation, and objection handling. Now that we have the right people and the right strategies, next follows execution-level skills.
I initially set management expectations that it would take over a year to realize any progress. I gained influence and bought time with upper management when they saw the types of sales managers I brought in. Then, after the sales process training, we won several large deals where the new process was acknowledged to have played a significant part.
We are now focusing on the necessary coaching and metrics to make the process permanent.»
example of how managers set priorities to achieve dramatic sales improvement comes from Lexmark:
When I spoke at Lexmark in 2002, I could tell that Bruce Dahlgren, the vice president and general manager, understood sales performance and how to make it happen. He knew that the strategy of building an installed base of printersand their related suppliesneeded to be complemented by unique service and solution offerings. Simply put, they had to build more value.Lexmark was previously the IBM printer division and had remnants of that culture. But Dahlgren changed the way the company sold with new people, new process, and new positioning for his solutions. And he reinforced it with coaching.
Rather than simply moving printers and ink, Dahlgrens team focused on the larger strategy of Print, Move, and Manage, a spectrum of industry-focused solutions aimed at helping Lexmark customers address real printing and document process challenges. That meant more consultative selling and new roles for some people.
Turnover had been at around 25 percent before, and we kept it there for a couple of years, said Dahlgren.But we were much more purposeful at bringing in a new profile of salesperson able and willing to sell solutions. Now the turnover rate is down to 3 percent.
With the right people and processes in place, Dahlgren turned the attention of his management team to account strategy development and coaching.
My managers had a challenge merely finding the time to coach, Dahlgren said.So I looked at their administrative workload and eliminated several reporting activities that werent really needed.We had to convince finance, but it freed up the time.The other thing we did was to designate every Monday as a coaching day in the office. Each manager reviews each major account and the action items for the week compared to our plan.
We also wanted to send the message that I actually read the forecasts and account plans. This let them know that our focus on coaching was not some half-hearted initiative they could ignore and hope would go away.