What we do | Sales Offerings View | Orchestrate Better
Orchestrate Better
The biggest competitive advantage for sales organizations, which hidden in plain sight, is teamwork. If only sales organizations could figure out how to team better and orchestrate better, their ability to win in the marketplace is maximized.
Teaming is a tapestry of psychology, neuroscience, tools, and technologies that interweave and sequence to produce a greater result.
Our offerings are designed to maximize the potential of your teams, to synergize and deliver at a higher level.
Time Team Technology and Transition Management
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It is no surprise that sales managers are not provided all the skills and training that is required for them to maximize their effectiveness. There is an inherent assumption that they possess most of the sales management skills, which organizations are discovering is not necessarily true. In coaching thousands of sales managers over the past several years, we are constantly surprised about how the basics of management are still struggles for them.
Our Approach
- The greatest leveler is time. Management efficiency and leadership effectiveness is indexed around how sales managers plan and spend their time. Harmonizing their various roles to maximizing their effectiveness is key.
- The biggest single impediment to sales managers effectiveness is the “Expert’s Curse”. This is when sales managers start doing what their team members should be doing and start telling when they should be coaching.
- Technology exists to drive sales acceleration. The effectiveness of a sales manager lies in their ability to get technology to reflect “one version of the truth” and to gain hindsight, insights, and foresights from the data.
- The ability to appreciate and apply the principles and practices of change management can make a clear difference to the effectiveness of the sales manager.
How do we engage
Time is a fundamental constraint for sales managers and any engagement needs to be designed while respecting these constraints. Our engagements modularize the key capabilities that every sales manager should possess.
Modularization helps the sales manager appreciate the new normal for their skills and engage in different experiences that helps them imbibe and embed the new set of skills and behaviours that are relevant for the future.
Interactions with a sales coach who has also been a practitioner helps the sales managers contextualize their learnings better. Specific situations and challenges help the sales managers build situational fluency in their application of new knowledge.
This combination of modularization, customization and experimentation provides the rich environment for the sales manager to gain the foundational skills that would amplify their effectiveness.
Impact driven for customers
Sales managers who have benefitted from our programs and were promoted to the next level, tell us that their engagement with us has transformed them in many ways:
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They now know how to balance time, team, and talent to maximize productivity.
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Their meetings are far more effective on account of their ability to leverage technology and data to have deeper meaningful conversations.
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They have more time for their own leadership development due to their increased ability to situationally lead and coach their teams.
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The program has allowed them to overachieve on their commitments because of their increased ability to manage a better book of business.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources to Help Your Team.
A Time Management Framework To Help Salespeople Manage Their Meetings Better
A Time Management Framework To Help Salespeople Manage Their Meetings Better
Customer Stakeholder Management and Orchestration
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When the external environment is volatile, your customers’ perception of risk becomes higher. This results in the multiplication of the number of stakeholders involved in any decision.
For sellers, the increased complexity of stakeholder identification and navigation can sometimes be daunting. To add to this mix, enterprise sales organizations have invested in several specialist sales roles that include technical sales, solution sales, industry sales, partner sales etc.
The ability to orchestrate internally, externally and across the channel partner eco-system becomes a vital capability for sales organizations to thrive in the new abnormal.
Our Approach
- With awareness comes choice and the clarity of choices drives focused action.
- The first step in stakeholder management is awareness and identification of who is involved but more importantly why are they involved.
- Every person is motivated by self-interest. They may talk about organizational outcomes, but their decision making is biased by self-interest.
- Time is the greatest leveler, so sales professionals need to understand how to best focus their time for maximum impact across stakeholders.
- The greatest problem assailing teamwork is the assumption of alignment. Therefore, the need to design a set of transparent deliverables and expectations becomes important in the journey towards internal orchestration.
- When sales professionals work in teams, a discussion on how they could become force multipliers among themselves could be the game changer that gains them a greater share of the addressable market.
Impact driven for customers
Most teaming engagements around orchestrating better, are custom designed and mostly involve critical internal and external stakeholders within the engagement. The best engagements are those that blend internal planning and orchestration, with external strategy and execution.
In sales environments, either the account or the opportunity is best kept at the center to drive the planning and execution.
Teams who go through our exercises often share that this is the first time that they have strategically come together to consciously plan for their customers.
They are surprised how much every person can contribute, and how little they collaborate. Although global team orchestration guidance exists within large multinationals, there is no local orchestration agreement that is defined, leading to suboptimal execution.
Our internal orchestration workshops expose the pleasures and pains of collaboration while also offering inspiration and guidance to synergize more.
Our orchestration workshops with customers sometimes exposes the lack of visibility with senior decision makers and a clear stakeholder management strategy that includes key stakeholders like mobilizers.
Typical results experienced by customers:
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Greater clarity and alignment with responsibility and accountability clearly defined, within the internal teams.
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A definition and strategy for customer stakeholder management with defined ownership to drive for results.
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An execution rhythm that involves constant communication and periodic collaboration to further the customer’s agenda.
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Greater awareness of competition and their activities
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A sense of collective ownership and pride, that defines their collective successes.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers to build multimillion-dollar pipelines for one of the largest enterprise business software companies.
The enterprise team of one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world discovered a need to significantly improve the quality of their pipeline. In addition, they needed their managers to improve their coaching skills so that they could drive sustenance within the business. These two requirements needed to be combined and they reached out to Tripura Multinational to fulfil these two goals.
As part of this engagement, we decided to use coaching as the fulcrum for change. We led by example on the first account plan as the entire team got together to be coached. All the sales managers observed this demonstration of coaching to understand the finer nuances of coaching, facilitation and project management. The art of asking hard questions in a soft way, structuring the conversation towards specific outcomes and facilitating everybody’s contribution and ownership to the process were key take-aways by the managers.
For the next account, one of the sales managers had to step up and replicate what they had observed earlier using their own style of facilitation and coaching. This dance of observation and application provided each manager with a tremendous opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and bring out the best in their account teams.
With this customer, around $125 Million dollars of net new revenue was identified (globally, the same methodology has been used to generate over $5Billion of net new potential opportunities world-wide). In addition to the discovery of the pipeline, the managers were also coached to stay accountable to the qualification, acceleration and closure of the pipeline as well. Within the first three months, this initiative yielded an additional $8 million of revenue which could not have happened without this engagement. Moreover, this methodology has been leveraged by each of the managers to coach each of their account teams to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of net new pipeline.Recommended Resources to Help You Better Orchestrate.
The 30-3-30 Formula for Sales Teams
The 30-3-30 Formula for Sales Teams
Orchestrate2Win for Complex Deals
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Larger the deal, greater its complexity. Large deals are defined as those deals that are at the top 1 percent of the deal pyramid. Depending upon the nature of the industry and the customer, these can range from anywhere between a million dollars and a billion dollars.
For complex deals, pursuit teams are normally identified, and ownership assigned, with the hope that they would collaborate and move the deal forward interdependently.
The definition, membership and ownership of pursuit teams does not guarantee its collaboration nor its ultimate success. The synthesis and sequencing of a pursuit strategy is critical to make progress on the deal. Our engagements typically reside at the intersections and interfaces of these complex deal pursuit teams.
Our Approach
- The chain is as strong as its weakest link – it is important that the Account Executive possesses the gravitas and empowerment to carry the weight of the deal on their shoulders.
- Reciprocity drives businesses in the internet era. Therefore, complex deals often involve investments (cash investments, stock stakes, partnerships etc.) that are approved at the executive layer of both organizations. This needs careful planning and sequencing.
- Complex deals involve the interplay of people, power, and politics. The ability of a pursuit team to understand the informal power matrix and navigate interests and positions becomes important to progress the deal.
- The partner ecosystem plays an important role in bringing complex deals to fruition. Dexterity and finesse are required to manage multiple partner expectations and demands.
- Complex deals often involve multiple swim lanes with varying velocities which requires careful planning and orchestration to move the deal forward.
Our engagements seek to bring together these principles and practices and is designed to maximize the probability of success in complex deals.
Impact driven for customers
Customers who have worked through us on their complex deals are sometimes surprised how a critical set of insights could be differentiators that could set them apart. They are also grateful that their blind spots get exposed through our engagements. Some of their incorrect assumptions on value are also brought to light, all of which help them define and refine a better winning strategy.
Recommended Resources for Better Team Orchestration.
6 Ways To Get Your Sales Team To Collaborate
6 Ways To Get Your Sales Team To Collaborate
Coaching Groups to Become Teams
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The necessity to coach for a sales manager is never in doubt. However, sales professionals can sometimes suffer from poor or ineffective coaching from their managers. It is therefore incumbent upon organizations to provide sales managers with the right capabilities to become good coaches.
Our Approach
- Coaching is a journey and from a practitioner’s perspective, it moves from awareness to appreciation to application.
- Organizations expect their sales managers to coach but these managers themselves have not experienced the power of coaching.
- Therefore, it is imperative to provide sales managers with a coach who can get the sales manager to experience several “Aha moments” that triggers their understanding and appreciation of the power of coaching.
- The key to building sales managers as good coaches lies in their application of coaching. Whether it is with a team member, an internal stakeholder or a customer/ partner, their ability to coach across different audiences and teams becomes a core competency to build a coaching culture within the sales organization.
Impact driven for customers
Customers leverage this offering when they need to drive three types of outcomes:
- Build volume in their pipeline
- Build velocity for their deals
- Build quality in their execution and people management
Each of these scenarios involve existing accounts, deals or teams through whom managers need to operate to add greater value to customers.
A typical application scenario for coaching involves a pre-brief to decide on the objectives and outcomes for the manager. The objectives and outcomes differ depending upon whether the target for coaching is either a team member, an entire team, or the customer/partner.
The second phase involves the actual application of coaching through their demonstration of the principles of coaching. Their efficacy in establishing a climate for coaching, their ability to structure conversations to powerful realizations and their ability to drive towards outcomes are all tested in the application scenario. This is when managers realize the gap between the appreciation and application of coaching.
The third step involves a debrief between the sales manager and coach on their mutual observations, blind-spots, areas of improvement etc. Multiple iterations of such applications of coaching, is what helps managers to build and sustain a coaching habit.
Organizations that have invested in building a coaching habit have been observed to showcase significant increases in pipeline volume, deal velocity and seller productivity.
2X increases in volume and velocity are not uncommon.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers across Asia to appreciate and apply the power of coaching for sustained sales performance.
One of the world’s largest software companies decided to establish an inside (digital) sales team across Asia to help lower the cost of sale and to amplify the acquisition of net new customers. Given the relative newness of the team and the extent of their addressable opportunity, it was felt that coaching would be a good investment to build their self- awareness, self-discipline and raise their execution quotient to achieve their results.
We designed a coaching engagement that brought together the best of our experience, in coaching sales managers across the globe. There were three specific areas of focus that helped the managers over deliver on their aspirational commitment for the fiscal:
- Plan for adequate number of coaching sessions (15 sessions over a period of nine months), to help the managers truly appreciate and absorb the power of coaching.
- Balance the coaching sessions equally between the appreciation of coaching and the application of coaching.
- Identify individual, team, and organizational challenges that the coachee could effectively apply their coaching skills to, which included their customer and their partner as well.
All the market areas across Asia over delivered on their commitment for the fiscal. Their conscious appreciation and application of coaching helped create bonding and aspiration within their teams, that still sustains in their collective passion for excellence for the subsequent fiscal.Customer Engagement Testimonial
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