Disrupting Traditional Approaches to Sales Transformations
Sales transformation is not for the faint of heart.
All too often we believe that changing sales behaviors can be accomplished by pulling the levers we have traditionally used; enhancing sales incentives, implementing a better sales process, improving the efficiency of the CRM or enhancing product or skill training to name a few. While each of these will produce incremental benefit, they will not transform your sales organization. And by transformation I mean, for example, moving from a product-centric seller to a solution seller, selling value versus function and feature or becoming your client’s trusted advisor versus simply a great service provider.
Sales Managers play a critical role in any successful transformation. They provide the necessary leverage to implement broad-based, strategic transformation projects, such as selling into a new vertical, maximizing sales with existing accounts, diversifying and growing revenue streams or acquiring new customers from innovative products. This isn’t new news to anyone. But how exactly are we helping them make the changes necessary to support their success? Are we simply applying the same approach I described above, such as improving the required skills and techniques so that they behave in a manner that “should” produce the outcomes we desire? If the answer is yes then you are likely not going to see any significant change or if there is change it will not be lasting. Great Sellers don’t necessarily make great Managers.
We often hire or promote sales managers who simply are not ready to take on the challenges of leading a sales team. We have all heard the story about a great salesperson who gets promoted into a sales manager role and then struggles. While this may be true, I believe it doesn’t matter who you promote into these roles, we are almost always putting these individuals into circumstances they are not prepared to manage. What Sales Managers run into is no different than what you and I experience when we are confronted with a new set of challenges; we are often unaware of the biases we carry that get in the way of being successful. An example may help.
Let’s assume that the goal of a Sales Manager is to help her team to focus on selling value versus product function and feature. The objective is to connect how the product delivers some tangible value that matters to the client, and therefore the approach is less focused on simply fulfilling a need several other competitive products could achieve as well.
In this case, a manager must be able to understand how a product will provide strategic benefit to her client and how the product fits into the client’s overall strategy. Not every sale would require such thinking; however, the capability is nonetheless critical. Our sales manager’s goal then is to help her team be more strategic in their thinking; doing so will help her and her team to focus on the short and long term implications of using a particular product.
What you Focus on Grows
But more often than not our managers are not behaving in ways which would lead to this outcome. On the contrary, she may be demanding an update each week on an opportunity that hasn’t closed or telling her seller exactly who to meet with, when to have the conversation and what to discuss. While these tactics may produce temporary or short-term benefit, they do not help her focus on the long term impact of getting the client’s buy-in on the value of the solution that ultimately leads to the client purchasing the product or service. And so while the desired goal is to be selling value, what the manager is actually doing is limiting her seller’s ability to respond creatively to the needs of the client which undermines their desired outcome. Everyone in this process has the best of intentions, but unfortunately, the system they operate in and the manager’s level of development are competing against those intentions.
Skills are Necessary but not Sufficient
Most Sales Manager Development programs focus on teaching the skills necessary to be effective managers. These are important, but not sufficient. More often than not, the manager is required to adapt to a completely novel set of circumstances, which are complex and highly specific to the new context in which they operate. Managers will look to institutional norms and their own history to understand what to do in these circumstances. They often feel overwhelmed, unprepared and exhausted from their effort to make sense of addressing the challenge successfully.
Great Sellers don’t necessarily make great Managers.
How We Uncover “Hidden Goals” To Drive Actual Transformation
To address these challenges, we’ve adapted an approach developed by Kegan & Lahey (described in their book Immunity to Change) to support a Manager’s ability to adapt to a set of increasingly complex challenges. The objective is to help managers understand how their beliefs, or as Kegan and Lahey refer to it, Immunity to Change, undermine their success and just as importantly, what to do about it. The process includes the following:
We start by discovering the outcomes you seek. What are the goals you want your managers to achieve? While we include their business goals we focus more on what behaviors you want them to exhibit to be able to achieve these business goals. For example, it could be to help the manager listen and ask better questions rather than telling the seller what to do.
Second, we look at the behaviors they are actually doing or not doing that work against or support those goals. This is where we uncover behaviors which are often getting in the way of a manager’s ability to successfully implement the desired change. It’s also what most training programs tend to focus on, teaching managers a new technique or skill to satisfy the expectation to know and do things differently. Again, the example could be a manager who is focused mostly on delivering on their number and therefore tends to ask questions related to deal status rather than helping their seller learn what they are doing is or is not working for them. There is nothing wrong with this by the way, but it will not help the seller learn how to ask their client better questions and listen more deeply so that they can, for example, connect product value to a customer need.
The third step is where we uncover the “hidden goal” as Kegan & Lahey refer to it. We learn what beliefs a manager holds that work against their stated goal. These beliefs are how a manager makes sense of the world. They are highly personal in nature and experienced as a core part of the manager’s identity. In other words, the manager does not see them apart from who they are. This is why a traditional skill training program will not support the adaptation the manager must make; and why sales process and methodology are necessary, but not sufficient. Using our example, the manager is afraid of being seen as not capable or is driven by a need to be right. In either case, their belief undermines a desire to help the seller learn how to uncover what is getting in the way of their being able to help their customer see the connection between the product and its ability to drive measurable value.
The final step is to help managers understand the assumptions they are making which keep the beliefs in place. Managers, mostly unconsciously, have convinced themselves that their very survival and happiness depend on maintaining the assumption that holds these beliefs in place. We see that only under difficult conditions, the prospect of failure for example, that managers allow the light to be shone on the story they tell themselves, which supports the belief and creates the self-limiting behaviors. And so, for example, the manager assumes that I am only valued if I can demonstrate my self-worth, to not do so would result in being seen as less than others.
Exploring the Edges of Leadership
The key to helping managers see and experience these beliefs is to create conditions which challenge and surface those beliefs. We do this by having them consider behaving exactly the opposite of what they describe in the second step. This, of course, takes courage and a willingness to be vulnerable. It’s important to remember that we are exploring the edges of your managers’ leadership; the space where they have been reluctant to venture but now must do so to respond to the increasing levels of complexity and challenge. Holding this perspective and supporting the process is critical for their success. Real transformation is hard work but can also be extremely liberating. What motivates anyone to face these kinds of situations is the belief that we are loosening the grip that some belief had on us so that we can include a new, more powerful belief. In so doing, we expand our capacity to meet more complex challenges, raise the level of our game and experience a deeper level of connection with our teams and our clients.
