What is a Sales Transformation?
A sales transformation is when a sales organization redesigns go-to-market strategy, sales roles, coverage model, customer engagement approach, compensation programs and supporting systems to drive sustainable revenue growth.
Sales transformations are typically how sales organizations respond to change. As companies grow and customer behavior, competition and market forces shift, sales roles, responsibilities and go-to-market models must evolve with them. Sometimes, a transformation may involve slight changes like adding new products to a seller’s bag. Other times, the transformation creates completely new jobs with new responsibilities. This may involve moving people from existing roles within the organization or hiring from outside. However, the goal is almost always to create the right roles plus put the right people in them to keep pace with the market and grow revenue.
Benefits of a Well-Run Sales Transformation
By executing a sales transformation effectively, sales organizations are able to:
- Respond to new market forces, revised priorities and revenue segment changes
- Build the agility needed to innovate faster than competitors
- Grow revenue from current products while developing new offerings
- Improve efficiency and lower operational costs
Beyond keeping pace, sales transformation can give your organization a leg up. After implementing sales transformation strategies, your organization will recognize the industry’s perpetual evolution and become a part of the cycle. You’ll enter a symbiotic relationship with change so you can benefit from it when others struggle to keep up.
Why Sales Transformations Stall
Inadequate change management causes over half of sales transformation projects to fail. The most common reasons for why initiatives stall are weak executive alignment, unclear change management, poor sequencing, thin data and limited accountability for outcomes. Investing in the right resources and a disciplined, phased approach is what separates transformations that hold from those that fade.
Five Phases of a Sales Transformation
Alexander Group’s sales transformation consulting improves success rates by developing strategies through diligent research, comprehensive consultation and an emphasis on pragmatic implementation. One of our most successful strategies is the Revenue Growth Model™ (RGM) blueprint, which is a proven model backed by rigorous analysis, proprietary Alexander Group benchmarks and proven expertise. The RGM blueprint helps companies instill new habits to harness the power of data, industry expertise and quick-to-market results that transform sales operations through proven tactics.
Here is what this roadmap looks like in practice:
Phase 1: Data-Driven Sales Transformation
Companies can no longer guess what steps to take but must leverage the valuable data available to them. Using proprietary Alexander Group benchmarks, quantitative analysis and industry insights, clients can now identify GTM opportunities that are specific to their company’s market position and business goals.
Phase 2: Move Sales Transformation on Your Timeline
Timing is critical. The RGM methodology develops a business case specific to your company, identifying growth opportunities, gaps, resources and timelines that create rapid change in weeks, not months.
Phase 3: Prioritize Activities and Sequences
It is not only important to know what to do, but when to do it. The RGM model and Alexander Group prioritize the right initiatives to take for the fastest results, placing steps in the right order to reach your goals.
Phase 4: Execute with Ready Steps
Successful sales transformation requires flawless execution. RGM provides practical, specific actions to realize high-impact solutions that truly transform your sales organization and optimize your GTM model.
Phase 5: Engage the Team
Transformation does not happen in a vacuum but requires commitment and ongoing collaboration. The RGM blueprint promotes team engagement so you can focus on what is possible and achievable. We help companies bring together sales, marketing, service and related departments to ensure continued engagement, equipping your teams for sustainable success.
Alexander Group’s Sales Transformation Consulting Approach
Adopting the proven RGM blueprint helps companies expand their valuation while responding quickly to market changes, and this approach is easiest to understand in practice. Here is how one national media company used it to reverse digital churn and get its sales force selling to customer needs instead of comfort zones.
Challenge: One of the top five largest traditional media companies noticed their sales reps were focused on “comfort zone” product pushing versus the customer’s needs or the upsell. The company began to see a high churn of digital products and below market growth. The company needed to restructure the sales organization to capture growth and align to their sales strategy. A shift to a customer-aligned solution selling approach would increase growth and sales rep productivity.
Solution: Alexander Group led a complete sales transformation of strategy, structure and management for this media company. Our team created unique sales enablement and accountability tools to support the sales force and the shift to solution selling. This sales enablement tool included:
- Sales Process: Documented with clear steps and focused on uncovering customer information
- Value Propositions: Tailored to business categories to demonstrate expertise and successful solutions
- Opportunity Pipeline: To keep track of accounts and upload completed needs analysis forms and proposals
- Innovation Rooms: For reps to ideate with overlays and craft effective solutions
- Leadership Scorecard: To keep track of sales transformation adoption and create accountability
Impact: With our help, the media company saw a successful sales transformation. They reported a year-over-year digital revenue increase of more than 22% in the three months following the project with a reduction in churn. The company also noted that over 75% of their sales reps are achieving more than 90% of the goal versus the historical figure of around 60%.
Making Sales Transformation an Ongoing Discipline
Sales transformation is not a one-time project, but an ongoing discipline. The organizations that grow fastest keep diagnosing with data and realigning their teams as the market moves, rather than resetting only when growth stalls. Alexander Group brings the benchmarks and hands-on implementation support that keep a transformation on track long after the kickoff.
