ACTION STEPS


ACTION 2: INVEST IN CAPABILITY BUILDING Frontline sellers also need analytical and strategic skills to best serve customers. They should be able to understand data, derive insights, and strategize on partnership options that will materially influence the customer’s profit and loss. Therefore, capability building is imperative, and chances are, if you’re not investing in your sales capabilities, your competitors are investing in theirs. In our recent survey of B2B sales organizations, 97 percent of respondents said upskilling frontline sellers is an immediate priority. Investing in learning and development


programs can be a solution for developing top talent. Best practices for designing and implementing such programs include making learning personalized, serving it in small bites, and reinforcing it regularly. Short, targeted, easy-to-digest content helps to keep participants engaged, increases their chances of retaining knowledge—and it takes less time. When done with the right recipe, it works. Companies that tailor learning programs to frontline sellers’ needs are 1.3 times more likely to be outperformers. Additionally, capability building should not be confined to frontline sellers. Managers are the lynchpin in driving team performance. You could support and equip managers with the skills to evaluate sellers’ capabilities, coach to fill the gaps, and help sellers adapt to the new skills they are being asked to master. Equipping sales with next-generation capabilities takes effort, but the payoff is significant. Top-quartile teams can deliver four to five times higher sales growth than bottom-quartile players (Exhibit 1).


ACTION 3:


RETHINK COMPENSATION AND INCENTIVES Compensation plans and incentives work best when aligned with the behaviors and results they are intended to produce. One way companies can craft effective compensation plans is by tying incentives to outcomes that individuals can influence directly. Quite often, incentives are tied to general outcomes, such as overall company earnings. This metric is likely beyond any individual’s control, and basing incentives on this distant outcome can weaken their effective ness. As business conditions change, incentives could change, too. While adjusting sales quotas in the middle of an operating year may not be practical, companies frequently introduce short- term bonuses or “kickers” around price capture or margin performance to motivate shifts in selling behavior and accelerate revenue ahead of competitors.


When it comes to recognizing and rewarding performance, you might take the route of encouraging outperformance, not just good performance. An S-curve payout can support outperformance, but to make it work, you need to carefully calibrate payouts and implement a rigorous review process for all initiatives (Exhibit 2).


Finally, design compensation plans to be simple, specific, and precise. Best practice indicates that any incentive program, both financial and non-financial, should be simple to understand and communicate. Investing in the capabilities of your frontline sales teams and managers provides a valuable lever to create resiliency, strengthen customer relationships—and emerge stronger when the rain clears. 


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