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SANDY'S RULE

A few years ago, I was asked to give a talk at a global sales conference for a multinational technology company. In response to plateauing sales, the leadership team defined a change strategy to reignite their growth. Unfortunately, they had announced the change nearly nine months before and it hadn't taken hold. With the conference only two weeks away, they were hoping I could help.

In cases like this where I'm hearing about a session just days before the event, my job more closely resembles triage than it does consulting or speaking. Since that happens fairly often, I've had to develop some shortcuts to get my arms around a situation quickly. One of these shortcuts involves writing the word NEW at the top of a blank notebook page. Then about halfway down the page I scribble the word OLD. As the clients explain their vision of the future to me, I begin taking notes under NEW. If my notes fill up the space between NEW and OLD before they finish explaining their plan, it's often a good sign that we need to clarify the strategy. I adhere to Einstein's dictum that “if you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” As my wife will attest, I play the part of a six-year-old disturbingly well so this method lets me leverage my gift of perennial immaturity. I've found that if I can understand the vision after just a few minutes, then it is usually crystal clear to the client's team members.

So when this call began, I opened my notebook and jotted down NEW then OLD on a blank page. After a few minutes of small talk I asked them to tell me about the new strategy.

“What is it all about?” I said.

The group's vice president, whom we'll call “Sandy,” jumped in to explain how the new plan focused on something called “co-selling.” Essentially, their internal salespeople would start working closely with the company's external distributors with whom they'd traditionally had more of what you might call a frenemy relationship. In theory, they are on the same team, but in practice there was an unspoken assumption that the external distributors might cannibalize your sales, and therefore your paycheck.

With co-selling the idea is that external distributors better understand the individual customer's challenges, while the internal salespeople at the company that actually makes the products better understand the range of possible solutions to offer said customers. By working together, they are able to recommend a more fitting solution to address each customer's unique challenges. Makes sense, right?

When Sandy finished explaining, I had plenty of room to spare between NEW and OLD.

So far so good.

A decade ago, I would have stopped right there and moved on to discuss the demographics of the group, the logistics of the conference, and other housekeeping matters. After all, the new vision was vivid and concise. It was crystal clear why the change needed to happen. Everyone understood what “co-selling” was and how to do it. And we had no reason to believe that they somehow lacked the skills or abilities to do it. This was textbook change management.