The 7 Tenets of Sales Transformation

5. PLACE EMPHASIS ON GENERATING QUALITY LEADS

As with many companies, good customers come from highly qualified leads. In this respect, the marketing team is as important to the sales cycle as the salespeople. Tata Technologies gets this, which is why it had its marketing department put a heavy focus on lead generation. Marketers were given the criteria that the organization found most relevant to its overall strategy (from the first pillar), and worked with those criteria to craft better messages. The company also invested in a marketing automation system, which allows marketers to develop better content and test it around specific campaigns to track the reactions it evoked. This enabled Tata Technologies to take the same model it used to find its 97 key customers and employ it to find prospects with similar potential value.

And to ensure the sales force focused on high-quality leads, incentives (for both marketers and salespeople) were placed around strengthening the pipeline: The company announced it would give away Land Rovers to the top performers in each of its three territories. Any opportunities that were generated through marketing, and ultimately passed along to the salesperson before being converted to revenue, were tracked and rewarded accordingly.

With a strengthened incentive plan, coupled with a strong marketing automation system, Tata Technologies was able to triple its number of prospects within six months of implementation.

6. ASSEMBLE A 'BID RESPONSE' TEAM

What's a great lead if you can't act on it when it really counts? To ensure that every highly qualified lead is attended to, companies should always have the appropriate talent and materials on hand, ready to act at a moment's notice. "What we did was identify individuals who had the required experience about what it is we do and [could] make it compelling to customers," Weitzel says, "but also [had] the technical knowledge to be able to back that up and really craft winning proposals for us."

If the company finds it has a need for a particular type of engineer, it will locate that person and fly him anywhere in the world to assist with a deal. Members of what it calls the Bid Response Team are equipped with suitable materials, including reusable content such as case studies, compelling proposals, and packaged service offerings. When faced with a large and critical deal, they work in concert with some of the most seasoned, high-level executives from the strategy team.

Of course, all of this requires that sales managers recognize which member has the required expertise to work magic in a particular situation. While there is not necessarily a perfect system for recognizing and handpicking that talent, there are steps companies can take to make it easier.

Tata Technologies prioritizes identifying workers with strong communication skills, personality, and the knowledge necessary to close deals. To gather such an elite group, companies should give personnel the chance to stand out, Weitzel suggests. Tata Technologies has educational programs in place at universities within each of its regions where employees can study and improve their skill sets. Each year, through what the company calls the "talent pool," candidates can prove themselves through tests that measure business acumen and strategic thinking.

With such programs in place locally, along with recommendations from trusted colleagues within each region, Tata Technologies can recognize, nurture, and promote talent—and provide ample opportunity for employees to help themselves.

7. ORGANIZE A ‘SALES WAR ROOM’

One of the most important components of the sales transformation plan was the "sales war room"—effectively, a system for monitoring and tracking the performance of the sales teams. Executives organized biweekly meetings in which the teams reported to the CEO.

The war room meetings enabled the company to isolate the key metrics driving performance, and determine which teams were meeting quota and which ones were struggling to adapt. And any new initiatives or changes under each of the seven pillars were proposed and evaluated in the war room.

Companies would be well advised to organize such meetings to help them keep track of sales performance, both overall and team by team. "It helped us with two major aspects," Weitzel says. "To both govern, and to change."

ABC—ALWAYS BE CHANGING

While it's not one of Tata Technologies' seven pillars, there is an additional consideration that is important enough to add here. It is the impermanence of pretty much everything in the sales ecosystem. As Dickie puts it, "We're selling at the speed of change, and we've got to be able to adapt.”

And in a volatile marketplace, Dickie notes, where change is bound to occur at any time—whether in the economy, the law, or technology—it's vital to be able to anticipate it, and adjust.

Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.