The first and most important essential for scaling sales success is that you must have a sales strategy to achieve success. The sales strategy sets the foundation. Having a sales strategy is important in all aspects of business, but having a concrete strategy to achieve measurable success in the sales world is truly an essential. This sets the foundation for how your sales team will approach their goals of meeting and beating quotas.

Without a strategy, it is very hard to scale excellence because:

• There is no basis for decision making
• There is a lack of clarity for how and where the sales organization should focus its energy
• Scaling excellence is impossible without first establishing what you want to be excellent at

Below are 4 important tips for spreading a new sales strategy through the organization:

1. Define the strategy that you want your sales team to follow.

This certainly isn’t as easy as it sounds. Initially you will be met with pushback and reservation. Most will be loyal to their current selling tactics which may no longer align with the new strategy you have implemented. Therefore, you must then:

2. Identify those within the organization that can quickly adopt and champion this strategy.

Once you have defined the strategy, right off the bat you have to find who is willing to embrace it and become an advocate for it in the organization. These people are very important as they will become the trailblazers whose leadership will demand imitation. Once you have defined the strategy and identified those who support it, you can begin:

3. Hiring, developing and promoting those who support the strategy.

At this point you are able to define the attributes for your ideal sales person and you can start hiring those that share these attributes. You want to create a culture in the organization where the adoption of this strategy is the social norm. Recognizing and rewarding those that adopt the right mindset helps to facilitate a connection and community between all the “true believers”. After you start building an organization comprised of these true believers, you must:

4. Transition out those who can’t or won’t support the strategy.

While you may have some individuals (frequently top performers) who do not completely adopt the strategy, everyone needs to be supportive of the organization’s direction. In order to create a culture of excellence, you can’t have individuals who can’t or won’t support your strategy.

Following these steps will help in spreading a new strategy through your sales organization.

 

To read more from the Scaling Sales Success series:

• Scaling Sales Success Series Introduction
• Building Buy In for the Sales Strategy (Essential 2)
• Determining Requirements for Execution (Essential 3)
• Understanding Your Organization’s Ability to Execute (Essential 4)
• Closing Capability Gaps (Essential 5)
• Driving Momentum Through Your Managers (Essential 6)
• Removing Barriers to Execution (Essential 7)
• Celebrating and Rewarding Success (Essential 8)

 

To download our eBook on Scaling Sales Success, go here.