The Sales Curmudgeon: Don't Bet on the Wrong Horse

This is the fourth of a five-part series where I essentially predict your future, and give you the top reasons why your sales initiative will blow up. Forewarned is forearmed. 

Today’s blog is about the fourth reason you will probably fail your mission: you don’t put enough thought, effort or courage into building the right team to implement your sales initiative. So you make a hasty, easy decision. And, as a result, you bet on the wrong horse.

Reason #4 Your Initiative Will Fail: You Bet on the Wrong Horse

Projects are tough to implement. I know. I’ve implemented a few in my day. Some were rougher than others. They’re hard because they bring out the sum of all fears.

It seems simple enough. Let’s implement Salesforce.com out-of-the-box … let’s implement a five-step sales process … let’s haul the reps into a classroom and teach them to negotiate better.

Let’s, Let’s, Let’s.

Let’s face reality. It’s harder than it seems. Whenever the simple idea meets the people impacted, unpredictable things start to happen. As military strategist Helmuth von Moltke put it, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Why does this happen? Many reasons … I’ll give you two: you place too much faith in the training event and you assemble the wrong implementation team.

Done correctly, training events accomplish three things: impart knowledge, hone skills and communicate expectations. That’s it. They don’t permanently change behaviors. You say you understand this, but you really don’t. Otherwise, you wouldn’t lose interest after they’re over.

Training is neither the beginning nor the end of the change process. It sits squarely at a brief moment in the middle. If you’re measuring success by how many people attend and the score you get on the little course evaluation sheet, you’re a dead man walking.

The time spent in training should be dwarfed by the time spent making it happen and the time spent changing how people do stuff. What happens before training makes it relevant; what happens after makes it stick. As the sales leader, you are in charge of both.

Enough on that, I’m sick of hearing myself talk.

Let’s move onto the implementation team you assemble; “The horse you bet on.” As with most things in the wild, your choices come down to three: Do Nothing, Do it Internally or Do it with a Third Party.

Do Nothing - An Effortless Horse 

Doing nothing means convincing yourself that things are just fine as is. It’s the low cost option and seemingly the low risk option. Plus, you’re pretty good at preserving the status quo, so it’s a natural horse to bet on.

Do it Internally - An Alluring Horse

You know your sales team needs to be fixed, but why pay some high-priced consultant to do the fixing? At their fees, you could probably hire a person or two. So you rely on your sales enablement team.

Throughout the years, I’ve come across two varietals of sales enablement: the empowered and the downtrodden. The empowered sport a nice blend of experience. They’ve been in the trenches dropping stomach acid quarter after quarter, and they’re great in front of a crowd. They have street cred and presence. They’re good at both strategy and execution. Often, they’re staffed by a combination of Sales Managers on a career development tour of duty and learning professionals who develop and administer the programs.

The downtrodden sales enablement teams are unable to execute because they haven’t been given the authority necessary to get the job done. Sales management has abdicated the responsibilities of making sales enablement important, relinquishing any effort to align sales enablement with their management initiatives. The downtrodden are likely still dropping stomach acid, but go quarter-to-quarter powerless, because they haven’t been given the platform to resonate with sellers and front-line managers.

Third-Party - A Risky Horse

Risky because if you pick the wrong one and the bet is high enough, you may well lose your job. These horses also come in two varietals: the thoroughbreds and the glue-factory.

The thoroughbreds have a solid implementation methodology and a learning suite that was designed to be tailored to your environment. They’re sales consumable, immediately applicable and easily adopted. They care about your business as much as you do. The thoroughbreds are disruptive. Rightfully so. If you want to have a disruptive influence on the market, you need the courage to disrupt your team. No guts, no glory.

And then there’s the glue-factory. You know these tired, old horses. They’re the “name-brand”, 80’s and 90’s based folk who taught your grandfather to sell vacuum cleaners. The goal for these worn out nags is to sell you “butts-in-seats”. Their definition of relevancy is changing the logo on the first slide. Their definition of adoption is a “90-day pulse check”, which is really just an opportunity to up-sell more butts-in-seats. Nobody ever got fired for hiring these guys, right?

No … except, of course, the person who was being held responsible for achieving an ROI on the sales initiative.

1. Name-Brand Training Company 
2. Do it Internally
3. Do Nothing

My advice? Do nothing. Nothing ventured; nothing failed.

The Sales Curmudgeon is a sales management veteran who has suffered countless sales initiatives. He knows why some projects succeed wildly and others fail miserably. Experience has taught him that very few leaders will risk what it takes to make a real difference.