With graditude to Dave Kurlan and his team at Objective Management Group, let's talk about the decisions you can make over the next few months to put your company in position for tremendous revenue growth in 2011. Is your sales force optimized? While you may not need to resolve all of the issues listed, many will apply:
- Optimization – do we have the right number of salespeople and can we do more with less?
- Roles – do we have the right salespeople in the right roles and, if not, what are the best roles for them?
- Models – which of our salespeople can make the two most desirable sales transitions of the 21st century? Who will be able to transition from behaving like an account manager to being more proactive at hunting for new opportunities and new business? And who will be able to make the transition from presenting/proposing/quoting to more customer-focused consultative selling?
- Process – do we currently have an effective sales process or do we need a more formalized, structured, optimized sales process?
- Selection Criteria – have we been selecting the right people for our sales organization and, if not, how should our selection criteria change?
- Alignment – is our sales leadership/management team aligned on strategy?
- Execution – is the current sales force capable of executing our changing strategies?
- Sales Management – how effective is our sales management team at coaching, motivating, recruiting, developing and driving accountability? Is their success or lack thereof a result of their people or their sales management skills?
- Development – Which of the B’s, C’s and D players can step up and become A’s and B’s and who can’t be developed? What will it take? How long will it take? How much improvement is possible? What will the ROI be?
- Compensation – Is our current compensation plan effective and are our people motivated by it? If not, what must change?