Initiate Continuous Improvement Within Your Sales Organization
Mark Haubert – President of Tiger Consulting, The Sales and Marketing Transformation Architect™
Whether you are a Board Member, Chief
Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, President or a Sales and Marketing
leader, you want and need to get the most out of your sales and marketing
organization. As you evaluate your team’s performance, you might ask yourself
the following questions.
- What are the strengths of our sales and marketing organization?
- How is our team performing relative to industry best practice?
- What are the most impactful changes that we can implement?
- How can we prepare the team to deliver future company growth?
Why should your company invest in your sales and marketing organization?
- To provide clear strategic direction, objectives and performance feedback.
- To develop a sales culture and structure that motivates and enables the sales organization to perform at a high level as individuals and as a team.
- To elevate the results of middle performers by defining roles and competencies, then implementing enhanced training, coaching, performance management and reward systems.
- To implement consistent processes, methodologies, tools and technologies across the team for customer engagement and opportunity management.
When is the right time to invest? Following are several scenarios.
- Your company is not meeting its revenue and profitability objectives. In this scenario, you can’t afford to not invest in elevating the performance of your team.
- Your company is at maximum operational capacity right now. This is an ideal time to invest in your sales force to close skill gaps, implement best practices and lay the foundation for future growth because you have the time and financial resources without the pressures of closing short-term sales.
- Your company has an experienced sales force that doesn’t need to improve. Most likely, your sales professionals have all learned different processes, methodologies and tools or they have developed their own. To maximize individual and team effectiveness, you need to develop and utilize common processes, methodologies, tools and language.
- Your company is preparing to sell to private equity or to conduct an IPO (initial public offering). Potential private or public investors want to see that you have a high-performing sales and marketing organization including people, process and technologies that can be leveraged to sustain future growth.
How do you initiate a continuous improvement program within your sales and marketing organization?
- Start by conducting a comprehensive maturity diagnostic survey to establish a performance baseline.
- The diagnostic will help to identify the current strengths and most impactful improvement opportunities for your sales and marketing organization.
- You can then develop and implement a short, medium and long-term maturity transformation/continuous improvement plan to develop a high-performing sales and marketing team.
What is a Maturity Diagnostic?
Tiger Consulting offers two distinct comprehensive maturity diagnostic surveys, one for sales and one for marketing. The sales diagnostic will evaluate elements of sales success across sales operations, customer engagement, opportunity management, and sales talent management. The marketing diagnostic will evaluate elements of marketing success across strategic planning, lead generation, product & service strategy, brand development, pricing management, marketing talent management, and marketing operations.
Each element is scored for current maturity versus the element's importance to success. A sample of the sales diagnostic results are presented in the chart to the right. Elements that have a high maturity and high importance represent strengths. Meanwhile, elements that have a high importance, but a low maturity represent opportunities for improvement. The opportunities for improvement can then be identified and prioritized.
The diagnostic report containing prioritized improvement opportunities can be used to map out a short, medium and long-term maturity transformation plan. High-priority opportunities for improvement may be selected for initial focus. Improvement plans can then be developed based on best practices, competitor practices, company culture and business model. Several improvement plans can be implemented in sequence or in parallel. Finally, multiple change initiatives may be developed and implemented over time to achieve the desired maturity and performance.
Developing a high-performing sales and marketing organization isn’t easy. Visit our website www.tiger-llc.com to request a Maturity Diagnostic Survey for your team. Mark Haubert is President of Tiger Consulting, a management consulting firm that helps companies to build high-performing sales teams and to implement strategic marketing plans to maximize growth. His experience spans sales and marketing executive leadership across small, mid and enterprise companies in the energy industry. Contact Mark at 713-249-4604 or mhaubert@tiger-llc.com.
