Implementing Change

In the end, accelerating your growth strategy requires that your selling organizations, both direct and partner, change. This, in turn means that people's behavior must change—no small task. For example, salespeople must adopt new sales behaviors and abandon old ones. Sales managers must manage a sales team that sells in a different way than they did. Partners must play new roles in your sales process. And all those that support the sales effort must change the support that they provide.

In our experience, you have to change the behavior of not just salespeople, but that of everyone involved in your sales process including partners, sales support, marketing and perhaps the entire organization. More importantly, we have found that sales organizations do not change easily or quickly. Thus, new sales initiatives must be aggressively and effectively managed as organizational and individual change.

The TAS Group has developed a pragmatic approach to ensure that you achieve the maximum return on the investment that you are making in your people and in our solutions. This approach is based on proven change management principles and our own work on changing the behavior of selling organizations using those principles.

Change initiatives fail for many reasons:

Employees do not view the need for change as urgent
The change process is not managed effectively
The change lacks executive sponsorship
The change lacks the ongoing commitment of executives and managers
The change is just one change too many for the organization

The result is that the desired change does not occur; time, energy and money are wasted; employees become frustrated; and the business impact is minimized.

The TAS Group's Implementation Architecture
In order to be successful in each sales effectiveness initiative, The TAS Group utilizes the Implementation Architecture. OnTarget uses this six-step change management program to ensure that the solution is completely aligned with a client's existing sales processes and to gain executive support and management alignment with the initiative.

Through hundreds of change initiatives and detailed research, OnTarget has learned that the key to any successful sales effectiveness initiative is gaining executive support for the program. Without executive support and reinforcement, sales and alliance professionals fail to internalize the process and to fully-leverage the new tools. The OnTarget Implementation Architecture is designed specifically to gain management support throughout the entire change initiative to help ensure long-term success and to help minimize risk.

Implementation Stages

OnTarget - Implementation Stages

Business Analysis - the implementation is mapped to the client's business needs
Management Alignment - top-to-bottom managers are aligned behind the change initiative to help maximize ROI
Integration - all pieces of the implementation are aligned and "plugged" together to ensure People, Process, and Technology are fully aligned
Deployment - the new approach is deployed to the sales organization
Transfer of Ownership - the client's sales managers and executives take ownership of the new methodology and tools
Management Review - the performance of the initiative is measured based on the metrics identified in the management alignment phase of the implementation