As most of you know there are 100's of different team performance "Sales" solutions out there in the market at present. Do any of them actually work and or can they make a quick difference in your team’s performance?

I was speaking with someone the other day about their business and they were telling me how they have "Coded" every single sales behaviour possible, and so they can now go into a business and sit within a specific sales environment and "Know" what’s missing or is needed within that team.

A great idea, I guess although whether you use this kind of process, or a more major global sales strategy and trust me I've seen most of them. It never ever seems to get as good a result as if you were to figure out exactly what your best ever internal people do, and consider how this matches to the biggest and best sales programs then build these attributes into your program!

You see over the past 10 years I have attended read or worked with clients who paid a fortune to get results from structured sales programs that have not made the difference they had hoped for, or thought they would have.

You may have experienced this yourself with programs like Solution Selling, SPIN selling, Cowan Brown, Exceed or one of many others. They all have incredible value, but ONLY if they can be tailored to fit and work in the specific context with which you find yourself. E.g. if you are in Financial Services and Retail banking you will need to use this process in quiet a different way to if you were in Life or General Insurance.

If you are in manufacturing and selling to wholesalers or in Telecommunications and you try to teach your teams to sell like people in another sector you may be in for a shock. So often clients have told me, we spent $XXX,XXX on this particular program and only achieved a 15-20% increase accross 5% of a population.

Damn I say feeling sorry for them, well rather than throwing the investment away, in some cases it may have actually worked extraordinarily well in the 5%, so lets code that and replicate it.

We have also rolled out many of our own solutions and seen exactly what works and does not work best. One of the biggest lessons we had in the early days was where you have a sales head, that refuses to change his or her own coaching and mentoring style.

One organisation we had where we knew exactly what was needed but could not get through to the person at the top of the sales team who never changed a thing and therefore results only occurred in segments where the other managers did not like him anyway. Hmmm - What was the lesson, make sure you have your most senior managers on board first! Understand who your talent is and how you need to manage them. Your ability to talent manage will in almost all cases significantly influence your results.

Over the years you hear again and again that we are bringing in this major consulting firm, this one or this one. Most often millions of dollars are spent with the result being that at times little if any change occurs in team results or on the front line. Why is that?

Consider some of the following reasons and then some things to do to switch it around in order to get results.

Things to be careful of:

• Bringing in a boxed solution or template not properly tailored from outside can be very risky. What "the best” safety managers, sales people, administration staff or contact centre TLs do can be very different from what you need. Ignoring the “Local Context” seems to cost organisations a fortune over and over.

• Avoid having a project led by an an area of the business that will not actually be using it or be fully accountable for the results that the project will or won’t get. E.g. HR make the decision with the business unit heads to go ahead with the specific solution, but the people “In” the business unit are only consulted in a token manner.

• It is counterproductive to roll out “Great” personal change/new communication/new performance techniques to managers of business units without ensuring that they are accountable for then passing this on and/or teaching it to their reports. At times, managers go on courses, go to conferences, get great MBA learning themselves from other participants or students and there is never any accountability for them bringing this information back into their own business.

Try Instead:

1)     Understanding the metrics that you are trying to change at the front line.

Is it staff turnover? Greater productivity? Better performance management mechanisms? Then for every step of the way, ask the question "Will using this intervention move those metrics?" If not, then it's probably the wrong one. E.g. teaching managers to better manage their own state of mind might be a great thing if it helps them be more focused, more present, more attentive in meetings and to manage their performance more effectively. But if this is not stated in the “Outcome,” then chances are this is less likely to occur.

2)     Gain a true understanding of what is and is not working inside the business.

Don’t just listen to the managers. Go and ask the people at the very lowest level of the business what they think is wrong. At times, senior managers go out to market and buy things to roll out to their people when inf act they are far off the mark.

3)     Ensure that people from all levels of the business can contribute to the program.

The more people who have access to interventions, the better the results. One of my clients had people going from very poor performance to very high performance fast once they knew what they weren’t doing right.

Getting results from Organisational Development and Learning and Development Programs is like any systemic change. Consider how  the system currently works and why. What kinds of things are going to help specific metrics? If you can't link the key pieces of the intervention back to the metrics, then you may have the wrong pieces and/or provider!

In this short video, IBM looks at some change project statitistics and suggests based on research from at least 1500 companies that the toughest areas to change are people's attitudes, mindsets and "The Culture".



They recommend a focus into four key areas to make things work:

1. Real Insights & Actions
2. Solid Methods
3. Better Skills
4. Right Investment – Time/Resources

Good luck!