It always seems impossible until it’s done.

—Nelson Mandela

You can’t change your personal DNA. The genetic code you are born with is what you are stuck with. It determines the color of your eyes and whether you’re left- or right-handed. It even plays a part in how you will develop and function.

Fortunately, what is predetermined in an individual can be recoded in an organization. The ingredients that make a high-functioning sales organization—the most effective management behaviors and the required employee capabilities and mind-sets—can be introduced, enhanced, and modified.

As a result, you can create the organizational DNA that makes successful selling second nature. Why does this matter? Less than a third of change programs and transformation efforts reach their performance targets. A staggering 70 percent of these failures are due to the organization’s inability to adopt required new behavior quickly and completely, not because the initiatives were substandard.¹ Having the DNA in place—the right people with the right capabilities, motivation, and attitude—gives the organization the ability to align, execute, and renew faster than the competition. This is not just an important part of sustaining excellence; it’s a precondition.

The story of a North American consumer-services company is instructive. It tried for years to transform the performance of its field sales organization, rolling out a parade of sales-stimulation programs—everything from unfocused prospecting programs to top-down corporate training initiatives. Few programs yielded more than incremental improvements, and often gains in pilot markets faded with time.

The head of sales rethought the approach. This time, instead of focusing solely on what the sales force had to do, the program also devoted significant attention to building the talents and capabilities to enable them to do it. The embedded culture was highly independent: 2,000 reps across some 200 offices worked on an entirely commission-based compensation model. The company needed to fix the wide variation in rep performance.

The strategy was to raise productivity by standardizing on the proven best practices used by the highest-performing reps. But to do that, the company would need to break down the old pattern of behavior—solo operators doing their own thing to get results their own ways. Research showed that the most important determinants of success among the top reps were their prospecting and selling approaches and the way they articulated the company’s value proposition. As we will detail below, the company made a substantial investment to teach these skills and enforced their use with specific goals.

The impact was enormous: a 25 percent improvement in rep productivity across all regions within 18 months. More impressive still, the gains stuck, and two years later performance was still improving. The program was so successful that the company has rolled it out for its small-business sales force and parts of its enterprise business. We shall look at how it achieved this success throughout this chapter.

The company is not alone in concluding that real change requires new DNA—new capabilities and an organization that can adapt and evolve. Across nearly all of our interviews, building capabilities was a common theme and was most often cited as the top priority for driving growth—even ahead of selling the way customers want or improving sales back-office support.

Based on our research and interviews, we see three themes common to all organizations that have successfully lifted performance by building sales DNA:

1. Create a culture for the long term. All great sales organizations have made it a priority to pursue long-term performance improvement, not just hit short-term targets. They reach this goal by weaving capability building into daily, weekly, and monthly routines to ensure that the focus never slips.
2. Give middle managers a starring role. These are pivotal actors in building sales capabilities. These managers are the agents of change and reinforce frontline transformations. Investing here gives you the biggest bang for your buck and ensures that improvements are embedded into the DNA.
3. Put together the A-team. Successful sales leaders don’t just focus on improving the capabilities of the existing team; they continuously seek to upgrade the people themselves. This is not limited to recruitment; it includes other people processes, such as initial training, promotion, and attrition.

Create a Culture for the Long Term

Continuous improvement has become second nature in most operational functions. It’s time to bring the same mind-set to sales. The barriers to creating a continuous improvement mind-set are substantial. Sales leaders have to deal with large, distributed teams and front lines that have a very short-term focus driven by (important) quarterly quotas and targets. Moreover, there is a perception that sales is more an art than science, and those reps and managers who believe this will likely resist change.

So how do you get sales teams to embrace continuous improvement? The answer lies in how you approach capability building. The effort must be led by the right people—credible members of the sales establishment—and the training must be appropriate to adult learners who prize independence and entrepreneurialism. Based on our interviews, more than half of all capability-building efforts generate no return, largely because they are not well tailored to the needs of the trainees. They were seen as nonessential because they were not tied to the company’s strategic objectives and did not help reps hit performance goals based on those objectives.

One driver of the consumer services company’s sudden success was the way in which it chose to build the necessary capabilities. Sales leaders designed an eight-week implementation program for each geographic market. Each new skill was introduced in sequence, allowing reps to digest each one and to ensure that it stuck. To do this, the company used a field-and-forum approach. Frontline personnel, who were selected as trainers, came together for in-person training sessions in which they learned about a new skill and then delivered the training in the field. At the next forum, the same group would return to share their experiences and knowledge and to learn the next program module.

The approach also tapped into principles of adult learning and motivation that we touched on in the previous chapter. Instead of the traditional conference-call kickoff, handover of a playbook, and a single visit from the training team, this program included in-person sales academies for managers, mandatory rep certifications, experiential learning, and e-learning modules. Leading companies use regression analyses of rep performance, time observations on the ground, and 360° feedback data to determine training priorities, and thus the most appropriate learning approach.

Role playing is particularly important in building capabilities and is a technique that all the high-performing sales organizations we encountered use intensively. This is particularly important for improving the softer skills such as navigating difficult conversations. One high-tech player, for example, uses regular deal rehearsals in front of sales managers and other senior executives to create a culture of coaching and to build muscle memory for reps so that they can reflexively articulate the company’s value proposition. A market research company we interviewed uses role playing and shadowing to ensure that the most critical selling skills are burned in. For less critical skills, such as remembering product facts, it relies on e-learning.

Once you have introduced a new skill, reinforcement is critical. Adults need to apply a new skill at least 20 times before it becomes second nature. At the consumer-services company, sales leaders ensured compliance by reviewing calendars to track whether managers were scheduling coaching sessions with their reps, and by checking updates and reasons for not closing deals. By tracking frontline behavior, management was able to intervene wherever it detected backsliding in the field.

Most important, the company made enforcing the new behavior routine. It developed a model to guide weekly and monthly coaching and development conversations, which sales leaders described as the most critical piece of the entire program—the glue that held it all together. By using regular coaching conversations with sales managers about long-term performance goals based on the new skills (and clearly separating those from short-term goals), the company constantly pushes reps to improve, even when senior management is not looking over their shoulders.

Finally, the company set long-range inspirational performance targets to make clear just how much improvement sales leaders expected. Reps were told that they would need to double prospecting performance. Not surprisingly, there was resistance to this “impossible” target, but the company stuck to its guns and found that these long-term targets were enormously powerful. They encouraged development conversations that focused on more than what was required to meet weekly, monthly, or quarterly sales targets; they acted as a constant reminder of the need to keep improving, even for those who were already high performers. Three years later the “impossible” was within reach of the entire sales force.

Give Middle Managers a Starring Role

Sales executives we spoke to emphasized that if you really want to transform sales organizations, your most important players are first- and second-line managers. They interact with reps daily and constantly reinforce good or bad behaviors. They are the role models that the troops respect, and they act as the change agents for a transformation. If these frontline managers provide coaching and support to inculcate new behaviors and processes, transformations take root. Too often, organizations underinvest in these managers and undermine the success of rep training.

When corporate-driven capability-building programs failed to stick in the field, one software company enlisted the front line to drive the process. High-performing managers and reps served on advisory councils to shape new initiatives and then owned the delivery and success of those programs in their respective geographies. When well-respected frontline leaders were the architects and advocates of change, new ideas took better hold, and the exposure that initiative owners gained accelerated their careers.

Danish telecommunications company TDC, which we discussed in Chapter 13, assigns a “navigator” to every manager to help identify local improvement opportunities and provide regular coaching. In effect, the sales managers were trained to become local change leaders. They were then far more effective at establishing and sustaining the transformation than any staff brought in from head office. Not only did the program deliver impressive growth, it also drove a 10 percent improvement in the sales unit’s internal “organizational health” scores (a measure of organizational functionality that includes factors such as speed of decision making and employee satisfaction).

At the consumer-services company, sales managers used to be completely removed from rep training. While a trainer ran reps through their drills and passed on valuable knowledge, the sales manager would be holed up in his office with no idea of the content of that conversation. As soon as the company realized this oversight, it brought managers into the training process, which allows them to talk to the reps about what they have learned and reinforce the new skills as part of daily rep supervision (Figure 14.1).

Like sales reps, many sales managers can be resistant to a more “scientific” approach to improving sales performance. The sales leadership at the software company put a great deal of effort into building a culture of leadership among managers to ensure the right role-modeling and coaching took place. Managers were all assigned a supercoach, who acted as mentors. These supercoaches sat in on coaching sessions, reviewed performance results, and graded the area sales managers’ progress. After successfully implementing the transformation in one or two offices under the guidance of their super-coaches, area sales managers could then fly solo (including running their own sales academies).

Not only did this increase the speed and traction of the program; it also made first- and second-line managers feel better equipped to do their jobs. Manager attrition fell by 30 percent over two years.

Put Together the A-Team

Building capabilities can have a dramatic impact on the success of performance-improvement programs. But at some point, your progress is limited by the caliber of your teams. Ultimately, continuous improvement also requires upgrading the quality of people, not just their performance. “Get the right individual in the right role” was a common refrain during our interviews with sales leaders. These executives invested more money and time in talent management—hiring the right people and managing their careers.

In a second phase of its sales transformation, the North American consumer-services company turned its attention to the quality of its sales force. It began by examining how performance changed over time and soon saw something startling: As early as four months into the job, it was possible to see the kind of performer a new hire would be for the rest of her career. In other words, if new hires don’t show a knack for selling or the ability to learn right away, they never will. But it was customary for managers to give new reps a free pass for the first 12 months, assuming that this was their development phase and that performance expectations should be lower. The company used this insight to accelerate the “develop versus move on” decision.

The company also provided better support for new hires to make sure they had the chance to shine. It created a six-month new-hires program to ensure that managers engaged early with new recruits and helped them perform to their full potential. The impact was impressive. By quickly eliminating the less promising new hires and saving on wages and hiring bounties, the company reduced recruitment costs by 45 percent. Management attention was focused on new reps who had the most potential, and revenues even rose by up to 3 percent as leads went to young reps who had better close rates.

Other companies have attacked the talent problem by investing in ways to predict success even before a hiring decision is made. A chemical company, for example, built detailed hiring profiles containing both obvious sales rep attributes, such as a technical background and evidence of commercial drive, and less intuitive factors, such as a background as a college athlete, which they found to be a reliable predictor of personal drive.

In addition to developing job profiles, some companies screen candidates for the qualities that make good salespeople. US department store chain Bon-Ton, for example, used personnel data to identify the attributes that made cosmetics sales reps successful. Now potential reps are tested for cognitive ability, judgment, initiative, and other relevant traits. Those who score in the top half tend to sell 10 percent more than the others and like their work more as well. Since 2008, the chain has seen a 25 percent lower rep turnover.

Executives at PNC Financial Services also wanted to improve its hiring strategy. They had historically tended to favor experienced outsiders over internal candidates, but they suspected that existing bank employees might actually have an edge. So in 2009, PNC’s human resources team partnered with colleagues from marketing analytics to analyze the sales performance over several years of external hires versus internal promotions. The data confirmed their gut feeling of the opportunity: in a number of key job categories, internal candidates were significantly more productive in their first year than experienced external hires. In subsequent years, the outsiders narrowed the gap, but never closed it.²

Top companies also recognize that all sales roles are not the same and require slightly different talents. In addition, sales roles more broadly are evolving from account managers to problem solvers, as we see in Chapter 6.

A high-tech firm learned this the hard way when it launched a new coverage model. The company had divided reps into one of three functions: direct sales, channel-led sales, or hunting, but the pilot had mixed results. So senior managers consulted the local sales leaders, who quickly pinpointed the problem: They had simply put the wrong reps in the wrong roles. Some reps were not well-suited to working with channel partners where the skills required were closer to those of sales management than traditional direct selling; others were not resilient enough to perform in the less structured, higher-risk hunting role. After taking an inventory of the existing reps, defining target skill sets, and closing the capability gaps, they reassigned staff. This unlocked the underlying potential of the new coverage model and secured 10 to 15 percent growth.

Getting the right individual in the right role is especially important in sales management. Too often the best sales rep gets promoted into the job—only to find that the skills required to succeed as a manager are quite different. Indeed, the best-performing sellers rarely turn out to be the best managers.

To develop sales leaders, a US financial institution has created a systematic approach for identifying future leaders. Very early on, all reps are assessed on these critical indicators of leadership: Are they capable and above average? Are they respected by others? Those who rate a check in both boxes are given assignments to test their capabilities further, such as running training programs or mentoring other reps. They are assessed against a rigorous four-part leadership model that does not include sales performance. Instead, the relevant metrics are covering relationships, people, strategy, and thought leadership. This gives the company a rich, qualified talent pipeline for succession planning.

It is just as important to keep on board those strong producers who are not cut out for management. So, many top sales organizations deliberately create alternative career paths for sales stars. One software company now elevates its best account managers to the same level as general managers, with compensation to match and commensurate titles. An IT hardware company uses financial and non-financial incentives to induce high-performing frontline managers to spend an extra year or two in their role.

Inevitably, getting the right individual in the right role also requires getting the wrong individuals out. Healthy renewal is a challenging but essential step in building sales DNA. Forced attrition during a major transformation typically runs at least 10 to 20 percent as you weed out those reps and managers who can’t—or won’t—make the change. One company we talked to targets a forced-attrition rate of 6 to 8 percent, even in the best of times.

Over the course of a few years, this “refreshing” can make a real difference. For example, the head of sales at a market research company used talent management to drive a major business transformation. Realizing that the business was evolving and becoming more solutions-oriented, he saw that his sales force would not be credible with the kinds of clients who would be choosing solutions vendors.

First, he hired former management consultants who could effectively engage with customers on business problem solving, and he trained them to sell. When he found he could not hire quality talent fast enough to meet growth aspirations, he committed to developing the next generation of sales leaders internally. He overinvested in the high performers, creating mentoring programs and stretch development opportunities to accelerate their career advancement. He also consistently managed out the bottom 10 percent, to minimize resource investment in low performers. Four years later, the faces in sales meetings were completely different, but so were the numbers—revenues more than doubled.

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Opportunities are only as good as the organization’s capability to capture them, and outstanding sales performance depends as much on the caliber of the team as on what is asked of them. The sales leaders we interviewed understand this. BMW’s Ludwig Willisch explains at the end of the chapter that salespeople need to be open-minded and have soft skills as well as the ability to close deals. Deutsche Bank’s Pedro Larena talks about bringing transparency to performance to motivate the sales force, and how to ensure that performance is measured in many different ways. The consumer-services company that forms the backbone of this chapter invested heavily to create a sales culture that met its aspirations: it recognized the importance of middle managers in embedding change and it was ruthless about building the best sales team it possibly could. The 25 percent productivity improvement in 18 months is certainly testament to the company’s approach.

Such a transformation is not easy. The determination to lead from the front is the fifth strategy of proven sales winners and is explored in the final section of the book.