The 7 Tenets of Sales Transformation

2. CONFIGURE TEAMS TO BETTER ALIGN WITH STRATEGY

Once the company determined what was needed to better serve its most desirable customers, it next had to assemble sales teams to get the job done. Often that means continually restructuring each team so that it works in accord with company goals. It also means removing barriers that inhibit much-needed collaboration.

Tata Technologies aimed to reconfigure sections of its organization to communicate better with one another, with the goal of servicing the customer. The company had traditionally been structured in such a way that certain parts of the business were separated from others. One part of the organization, for instance, was dedicated to selling engineering service projects; another provided product-lifestyle-management-related software—software that companies use to develop, design, and manufacture their products. "There's been great untapped value in having those two aspects of the business communicate with one another, and we had a great need to increase a lot of cross-sell between those two," Weitzel says.

3. PROVIDE APPROPRIATE INCENTIVES THAT REFLECT THE STRATEGY

Of course, once a sales team is in place, it's vital the company figures out just how to properly motivate its members. A lot of organizations might be aware of this off the bat, but it's likely they don't stop to consider which incentives make the most sense for their particular business. Weitzel opines that a good incentive is one that's "psychologically motivating and reflects the company's strategy." Accordingly, motivational strategy often differs from one organization to the next.

Since one of Tata Technologies' customers is Jaguar, a good incentive for the sales team, executives figured, would be one that demonstrated the value of the account—and convinced salespeople the product is worth presenting to the world: Three exceptional performers would be given their very own Jaguar.

It was also important that incentives be geared toward areas the company was focusing on strengthening. Since one of the company's big goals was to bolster lead generation, the company tailored incentives for this area of the pipeline. Dickie points out that all too often companies will incentivize the wrong action, or set inducements in place haphazardly. "When you deliver a compensation plan to a salesperson, you've got to realize that you shouldn't be talking to the salesperson, you should be talking to the salesperson's wallet." If sales to existing accounts are compensated the same way as breaking new business, for example, it's more likely a sales rep will focus on existing accounts, since these sales cycles tend to be shorter.

And it's not just sales teams that should be incentivized. The whole organization should be aligned on what it wants to accomplish, so it makes sense to extend motivational efforts to other teams. That's why Tata Technologies offers incentives to its "technical solution experts" as well as its lead engineers and programmers. "These are the people that are effectively partnering with the customers, delivering the solutions," says V. Balaji, chief information officer at Tata Technologies.

"We always say our customers eventually buy [our] product development expertise," Balaji adds. So each team assisting in the conversion has its own reward system in place.

4. NARROW THE OFFERINGS TO SUIT CUSTOMER NEEDS

Organizations—especially those with a vast array of product offerings—can benefit from determining what will be of most value to their customers at any given time. A company such as Tata Technologies has a lot to offer by way of solutions, but most won't provide what every customer is looking for at a particular moment. The company took some time to really examine its offerings. "We have comprehensive solutions, but we tried to focus on what we can bring to the market that's most valuable to [customers]," Weitzel says.

The company decided to narrow down its portfolio to the five or six products that would be most relevant to customers. To zero in on those areas, executives took a closer look at all the available data from previous work; specifically, they looked to the CRM system to read the activity and interactions with the company. "We aligned our CRM systems to track the percentage of the pipeline that was being allocated to each of [our] key solutions so that we could better understand what our customers were consuming, how are they consuming it, and what they are telling us as they start consuming this," Balaji says.