Give your teams the best chance of hitting target.
As a commercial leader, you are likely to have a big target. Certainly bigger than last year, and people within your team and/or organisation need to deliver.
But the problems in achieving this are multiple:
Your people are at capacity delivering what clients already pay for.
Finding new talent is tough.
The team is happier delivering work than finding new work.
Selling is seen as a scary evil thing that should on all accounts be avoided.
Energy and engagement is slowly coming back with some offices re-opening, but it’s still pretty low.
Big targets. Big problems. And big problems need big solutions to overcome them, right?
Wrong.
In our experience, the biggest growth comes from the smallest changes.
There are so many cases where we’ve seen the best intentions to implement change fall away within the first few weeks of a new year.
The reason is that in trying to create commercial change, things get very big very quickly. From talking about being a bit more organised, or selling one new service, the conversation escalates to cover things like developing a new culture, new initiatives, a new CRM being used, big account plans, different structures.
It’s unrealistic.
Work gets in the way.
Don’t get us wrong, the thinking is sound. It’s the ambition that needs pulling back if you want to act fast and make your business fit-for-target now.
So what’s the alternative?
In our experience, the fastest and most effective way to change, commercially, is this:
Enable everyone who’s client-facing to sell just that little bit better.
By selling we mean proper, client-focused interactions, not the shouting-down-the-phone montage that often pops into people’s brains when they think of it. See the example further down.
Now, we’re saying it’s the fastest change. You’re probably thinking ‘no way, that’s dozens/hundreds/thousands of people to change’.
But shooting for perfection, aiming to change culture, behaviour, attitude etc, all at once, is not what we’re talking about.
All you really want to start with is a small switch in behaviour. Getting everyone to start making one or two small changes that quickly become habit.
Here’s an incredibly simple, non-daunting sales approach for you to help get your client-facing people started:
Challenge everyone to ask, during project delivery, if anyone else within the client’s business would benefit from a similar project.
That’s selling. Scaling your work from just one question.
Suddenly, your sales force is not three or four dedicated sales people, but three or four hundred (or insert your numbers here).
How much easier does this year’s target look now?
So move away from the big changes and focus on the small. You’ll know you’re doing it right when the next time you hold a team meeting that is focused on what needs to change to achieve target, people at the end of it are saying things like ‘is that all we need to do?’ without being sarcastic.
Give it a go, we promise you’ll see big changes from small steps.
Want the proof? Check out this CASE STUDY on how the IGD changed in exactly this way:
