Executing Change: The Shift from Solution Sales

Executing Change: The Shift from Solution Sales:from The Sales Challenger™ by Cristina Gomez
There is no escaping the fact that change is a natural part of organizational life. Today’s sales leaders are faced with the challenging task of transforming their organizations into insight selling organizations in order to better position their salespeople to succeed in an increasingly complex selling environment.
If you are contemplating the end of solutions sales, and feeling puzzled about strategies to help your sales force adapt, you are not alone! Executing change is difficult, and here are a few reasons why:

• In a world of limited resources (budgets, people, time), it is hard to balance immediate business needs (meeting targets) with long-term demands (developing insight capabilities).
• People often act as barriers to adaptability. Your sales force is likely biased towards the current sales methodology and optimistic about the future, which makes any change seem less urgent.
• Key internal stakeholders often have conflicting constrains. Creating leadership alignment around a shared vision for change within an organization can be challenging.  

Every sales organization will face different barriers to change, just as every organization finds itself in a different stage of the transformation away from solution sales. Regardless of where you are in the process, you can be sure that executing change will require broad organizational commitment. Change initiatives often do fail to achieve the intended objectives, and as you might expect, implementation shortfalls are usually listed as the reason why. To avoid the implementation trap consider the following:

• Establish a sense of urgency. Don’t assume that reps understand the business case for change.
• Develop an articulated vision. Create a two-sentence description of the change objective you hope to accomplish in your organization, and arm sales managers with effective language they can use to communicate with reps.
• Create a change coalition and develop champions for your cause. Mobilize people within the organization and consider hiring or nominating a change leader who can deliver the change.
• Over communicate with your sales force. Most change management initiatives follow the pattern of building awareness, understanding, acceptance, and commitment. Creating an effective communication strategy will help move your sales force through these stages and drive adoption. 
• Quickly address change resisters, and publically reward and recognize change adopters.
• Anchor change in your company’s corporate culture, and embed your change in impactful organizational activities (e.g. training, recruiting, compensation, etc.)
• Align your performance management processes, sales organizational structure, and job descriptions with the new vision to reinforce the change initiative.

Have you been through or recently executed a change initiative? What suggestions do you have for successfully executing change and avoiding common implementation mistakes?
SEC members, learn what the 10 trends sales executives must know about in 2012 are, and learn more about how to sell the way customers want to buy in the insight selling era.