ONCE THE GROWTH STRATEGY is clear and in place, some “growth engines” simply need to be tuned-up. This is the continuous improvement work of Sales Effectiveness. In other cases, the growth engine must be built for the first time or significantly re-designed.
This is typically the case when external or internal forces cause a shift in the Growth Strategy significant enough to require a different infrastructure to implement it. In other cases, the general Growth Strategy may remain relatively unchanged, yet over time the structures, processes and systems required to grow have become misaligned, broken, or obsolete.
In either case, you may need more fundamental work on the Growth Infrastructure of your business. The Sales Force Design services of Entheon Partners can help.
Sales Force Design can include the following areas of your Growth Infrastructure:
- Designing the sales force organizational structure and roles
- Determining the right sales force size
- Optimizing sales territories and quotas
- Refining the sales process
- Upgrading Forecasting, CRM, and IT systems
- Developing compensation and incentive plans that drive the strategy.
- Building talent management systems (selection, recruitment, development, and performance management)
Over 70% of organizational change efforts fail, and there are two big challenges that must be overcome for you to beat those odds. The first is the challenge of complexity. Sales forces are complex systems with many interrelated moving pieces. “Everything affects everything”, so when you are changing one element of the sales organization, careful consideration must be given to how those changes affect the other organizational elements. The second challenge is engagement. Anyone who has tried to redesign or transform an organization has learned firsthand what our strategic partner Dick Axelrod says: “A future designed by a few creates unnecessary resistance, whereas people support what they have a hand in creating.”
To address these challenges, we recommend and prefer to use high engagement approaches. Learn more about why Methods Matter. Entheon partners with organizational change pioneer The Axelrod Group. Their Conference Model® approach to organizational design involves internal and external stakeholders in a series of integrated conferences and walk-thru’s. Conferences create an open exchange of information, increased understanding of the system(s) under consideration, new agreements and actions, and enhanced relationships among participants. Using this approach, participants at all levels create a sales organization – in record time and at a lower total cost – that is high-performing, aligned with the Growth Strategy, and an exciting place to work.
