As a business grows it must develop and align business growth strategy, so they are able to sell larger, higher value deals into larger, more complex customers. Its sales teams must be adept in dealing with more complex decision-making units. There are several elements to consider when developing a business growth strategy for your existing sales team. In this article we reveal why strategic alignment is a key component for sales force transformation.

Strategic alignment

“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”

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Once you have made the decision to go for growth you will, undoubtedly, have to do some work on a business growth strategy; segmenting the market, identifying targets, refining solutions and developing a marketing plan. The problem is, strategizing at the top level tends to happen in isolation, with little thought as to how it will play out when implemented. Effective salesforces could consider a business growth strategy across four facets:

• Strategy – your top-level plan for achieving the growth targets you have set
• Environment – the arena in which your sales team will be operating; for example, the current and predicted economic environment, regulatory issues, market expectations and competitive activity.
• Processes – things like your management systems, sales process, pay and conditions and CRM.
• Skills – the capabilities of each sales person

The key is aligning your business growth strategy. Each of these four facets must operate effectively in the context of the other three. So, for example, if your sales strategy is to be more consultative you can train your sales team in consultative selling skills. As a result, sales visits are more selective and take longer. However, if your sales process uses metrics such as the number of sales visits you make (and they often do) you are driving behaviour in the opposite direction. If sellers are rewarded for how many calls they make they will quickly abandon their newly acquired consultative skills and go back to doing what they always did, making lots of calls. Your entire business growth strategy then becomes misaligned and the whole initiative fails.

And remember, not every facet of a business growth strategy is under your control. Some time ago there was a big push towards Key Account Management with many companies investing heavily in Key Account Management strategies, processes and skills training, which were then rolled out. The problem was, many customers weren’t on the same page, they had no interest in becoming Key Accounts, they were totally happy with low prices and reliable solutions delivered through a transactional relationship. In this case the sales environment is misaligned and, as you can’t change that, it’s the other three facets of your business growth strategy that must be readjusted.

When developing your business growth strategy you must ensure alignment across all the facets.

Delivering Sales Force Transformation

For over 40 years Huthwaite International have worked with clients to achieve a measurable difference in the performance of their sales teams. We help our clients to achieve positive changes in revenue, profits, margin, team behaviours and attitudes every single day.

Strategic alignment builds a clear direction for developing an effective sales function within a growing business. Build on this knowledge and discover all four components of sales force transformation.

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