Episode 44
Navigating Negative Changes in Sales Organizations: A Sales Leader's Guide
Summary
In this episode of Building Elite Sales Teams, host Lucas Price chats with veteran sales leader David Archer about navigating negative organizational changes within sales teams. This discussion is especially relevant to those who aspire to manage their sales teams effectively, despite facing the potential for adverse effects on their team members.
Throughout their conversation, Lucas and David dive into the impact of sales culture, change management strategies, and sustaining team performance under challenging circumstances. They emphasize the notion that building a resilient sales organization is especially critical when navigating changes that might not be perceived positively by all team members. The conversation has valuable insights into ensuring team members are supported and maintaining open communication channels to manage and leverage the dynamics of change.
Take Aways
* Sales leaders must be purposeful and provide a clear understanding of the 'why' behind changes, aligning messaging across the organization.
* Building a company culture that rewards rather than punishes risk-takers, regardless of the outcome, is crucial for adaptability and resilience.
* Sales is a team sport, requiring close collaboration, peer coaching, and internal communication to achieve success.
* Change management should focus on preparing the back office and ensuring all team members understand their role in supporting the frontline sales effort.
* Persistent effort and the ability to navigate successes and failures define a sales professional's journey and growth
Learn More: https://www.yardstick.team/
Connect with Lucas Price: linkedin.com/in/lucasprice1
Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Connect with David Archer: linkedin.com/in/davidmarcher
Mentioned in this episode:
BEST Outro
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Transcript
This situation isn't pleasant, but nearly every sales leader will face it at some point. How we handle difficult situations says a lot about us as sales leaders. Today, we're talking with a sales leader who's been through this situation before, and he will share with us how to manage negative changes and come out stronger on the other side.
closing the largest deal in [:Prior to Zykus as VP of inside sales at Icertis, David led a high performing team to consistently beat its plan. David's career also includes notable roles, such as senior director of sales Where he played a pivotal role in the organization's growth from 70 million to 300 million and its IPO. And Chief Revenue Officer at Avidian, where he led the global sales strategy driving substantial revenue growth.
David, thanks for joining us.
[:[00:01:29] Lucas Price: I hope I didn't mess up the pronunciation on too many of those company names there.
[:[00:01:43] Lucas Price: I've shared a little bit about your background there, but How did you get into sales originally?
[:And I just hadn't thought about that, the entire time. And of course I'm on the sideline, so I'm not playing, but I had not thought about that. And so that summer I went out and just on a whim, I decided I was going to go to apply to the best feet on the street, just hardcore, this is aging myself, but this is, and you got door to door salespeople hardcore sales programs.
And what came up in my research was Xerox. Who does the whole, still around and does a whole bunch of stuff Gallo wines, which if you walked into any store had stuff placed all over the place and this this small company called Lanier that sold dictation systems, copiers and office equipment.
me, the chalkboard with the [:Everybody was in at six 30 in the morning. We literally had a. Van where we would pull our, if somebody walked in and said, Hey, I'd love to see a demo of what you have, or I'm interested in what you have. Do you have a brochure? We pull out a copy or a dictation machine or whatever it was. We'd wheel it into the office and grab everybody in the office, stop their day and demo them right there.
So Lanier's proposition was pretty much, they sold at 40 percent more than the entire rest of the market. With no significant advantage except for the fact that they trained their salespeople. I love that. Fell in love with it. Did it for a summer job? Came back the next year. And after I graduated with him, three, four months, I was the number one salesperson on the East coast and then the year number one salesperson in the country.
stupid stuff like I read old [:And, he, 40 years later, he wrote a book calling, calling himself the best salesperson in the world. And the old book is called how to sell an ag cooker. It's entirely misogynistic and entirely of its times because it was guys selling to housewives at the time, but it's it's still a great reading and I believe in the art and the science of sales and I totally do that stuff all the time.
[:[00:04:39] David Archer: I did. I I was a, I was a defensive back that eventually got relegated to a position called which I affectionately called it an ass back. Do you know what an ass back is? I don't know if much about football. So I would go up to the coach and be like, coach, we're up 40 to nothing on Cornell.
Can I get in? And he'd be like, Archer, hell no. Get your ass back.
[:[00:05:07] David Archer: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
[:[00:05:10] David Archer: So it's a
[:[00:05:13] David Archer: yeah, it's a great it's a great cadre. I'm still on a text chain with probably like 40 of those guys, so it's a lot of fun.
[:[00:05:42] David Archer: Yeah. My, my rise to sales management was I think pretty typical of, salespeople, which is I was six, I was very, I came out to Seattle to start selling, SAS software and was successful at it ended up, being a, running Asia.
For our [:I really didn't think about it much. I was just selling, doing what I would, doing what I was doing and and really involved in it, in, in every deal. And I know you've picked a kind of a really touchy topic for us to talk about today around like, how do you make changes especially the quotas and the comp and midstream and every, everything else like that.
It really wasn't until. Until I got to that VP level that I really started contemplating and thinking and, said, Hey, I got to come back and start studying stuff, studying change, studying organizations, what makes, what makes great organizations be adaptable to change?
s going on in front of them. [:You're now responsible for a lot of lives. You're now responsible for more than just your friends. You're, the folks you're going to go to war with, there's people in your organization that you don't really know that and. And how do you make them successful and how do you start thinking about it that way?
Which which was a big change for me.
[:I think that takes a lot of resilience and drive to be able to do those things. And I'm sure there's many more things we could point to that you've accomplished. I know there are many more things that takes that same kind of resilience and drive. Is there a moment or something in your background that you'd point to that was like, Oh yeah, this is where the flip switched for me.
And I [:[00:08:06] David Archer: Yeah, no, it's it started really early, it was probably like two and a half months into my very first job at linear. And so we'd go in six 30, every morning I'd been out, the night before as any 22 or 23 year old, wants to do, and then, and I'm sitting in the parking lot.
It's 6 00 AM. And I just don't want to go out of my territory. I have nothing planned. It's an entirely cold calling, cold calling day. All right. I don't have any meetings that I have anything set up for me. I'm like, should I just go home?
And a more senior rep pulls up next to me. We're not, we don't have to be in there for another half hour. So I'm like a half hour early. Okay. And he sees me, I'm literally like I'm leaning on my steering wheel, right? And he taps on my window and knows exactly what's going on.
with me throughout my entire [:And And so that's always resonated with me all the way through my, all the way through my sales career is that it's not about active effort. It's not about, not doing effort. It's about what is, what is your level of sustained effort? That you're willing to commit to every single day and get through.
[:The be able to fight the impulse to let up when things are good.
[:So I, my next job that I took was selling currencies. And I was like, okay, I now know how to sell. I know what it's, I know what it's all about. And I had, I had been making a great level of income selling copiers. That was like the number one guy in the U S and and when you're, whenever you're like number one coming in as an entry level salesperson and you're overselling of what the, like the major account reps are doing, you make great money.
. Then half, half the people [:And quite frankly, tanked couldn't do it. Just, like all of the sales skills. All of the things that I, that I that I had learned and that I thought it were, I thought it was great at I, I really couldn't do. Fortunately my old boss was had gone to a city in Seattle and started a startup and he called me and and quite frankly, rescued me from the concepts of currency trading and everything else like that.
But yeah, you have to learn your lessons.
[:[00:11:47] David Archer: Lucas, it's never easy. And as background, I grew up as the son of a foreign service officer. So I lived, I moved countries every two years [00:12:00] and every time I would go into work to see my dad, there was a Marine Corps officer or Marine Corps dress and dress blues letting you into the embassy.
And so I've always had a tremendous respect. Like I've, I always wanted to be a Marine. I always wanted to do all of those different types of things. And so as I was thinking about my change management strategy. I just naturally gravitated towards how did the Marines do it?
to eat. So I spent a lot of [:The way the Marines do that is they're dialed in on their back office. So as I think about sales process, I think about the sales communication methods. I think about all of the different things that go out to salespeople and touch salespeople and what your expectations as a salesperson are. That needs to be highly controlled your if the entire management organization is focused on three metrics.
ire I'll give you an example [:So you're running a business. It's stuff that you got to do. You have to go through a very defined process Of how you communicate of describing the why of making sure that that it's agreed upon throughout a large level, a large level of the organization, you got to set clear expectations for what's going forward.
You got to provide training and support, and then you got to celebrate the successes as it goes forward. And it's not like a one time communication. It's a process. That needs to happen again and again.
[:[00:15:00] Probably are going to end up not being a fit anymore because you're selling into a different market. And maybe they're, maybe they've been making a lot of money on an old comp plan. You move up market that makes the old comp plan, now.
It's not attractive to them. They don't want to go and sell to the new market. So you're there, there are these changes that are going to affect. People within the organization negatively. What does it mean to have the back office is always prepared. The back office is organized in that situation in a way to make that as smooth of a transition as possible.
[:[00:15:34] Lucas Price: Okay.
[:[00:15:40] Lucas Price: Yeah.
[:I'd like you to go do this. It's much more dangerous. It's likely to result in a lot more problems. All right. What would that Marine say? be like, [00:16:00] absolutely. This is who we are. This is what I want to do. I get it. This is where I'm gonna go. And they say that because they know you're gonna take care of me. All right. So having a culture where the cadre and everybody understands That just because I'm taking a risk as a senior executive or as a company or anything else like that that's not going to fall on you As an individual is really important. You may go and fail and if you do fail, we'll take care of you Because you've done well, you've done well in the past. You're a part of this culture. Every, everything else like that. It's sometimes a really hard concept to get through to executives in startups, in other organizations that the case, in the cases that you're talking about now, other cases that you, the other cases you were specifically talking about, yeah, there's some people who can't adapt to change. That's fine. Marines churn people all the time,.
[:Product is aligned to that market and marketing is aligned to that market. And you've done the sales enablement and the product marketing. And so that they're not going in there by themselves as well, . When they get to the top of the hill, everything, their dinner's going to be there.
The rest of the organization is going to be there supporting them as well. Is that part of what you mean by the back office is always really organized?
[:Your dinner's not going to be there when you get there. All right. They have a term for a foo bar. I won't repeat it, but everybody knows what it is. So there is, there is this concept of Hey, we are going to deliver the truth. We're going to deliver the parameters of what can make you successful, and we're going to hold you accountable to those parameters, and what we're not going to worry about is everything else, because here's what we [00:18:00] got. I don't have marketing for this. I need you to cold call. We need to do this. We need to do that, are you ready to go do this? Because the success metric is huge, or it's not, or it's important to the larger why?
Either way, the back office has to be aligned with that, . If there's if there is somebody in the back office that's saying, I'm not really sure that's the way we should be doing it. I'm not really, there's politics involved or anything else like that. That's going to land right on that salesperson.
That's working without marketing, working without this, working without that, and trying to take that hill.
[:[00:18:48] David Archer: Yeah. It's you, even if you're not getting an agreement across the entire organization, You need to get agreement on the messaging, right? You need to get agreement on the why and that why, and that and that agreement [00:19:00] for whatever change it is. And we've been talking about comp plan changes, which are the kind of the most emotional. But any change, you need to get agreement on the why across the entire organization, because it's important to.
The tip of the spear and as a sales leader, you have to go do that. You have to figure out a way to align. Your internal organization around the why of whatever change, whatever changes is making and we're specifically talking about changes that will ultimately be detrimental to the salesperson because if it's, for decreasing quota and increasing comp yeah, that's easy. And that rarely happens in organizations. But making those changes and having that back office aligned. Absolutely. Critical.
[:[00:19:52] David Archer: Sure. I don't think it's a surprise to anybody. I think everybody. Everybody understands that I couldn't sell this [00:20:00] myself. Because if you could, you wouldn't even be in this company, right? Like you'd be selling it yourself. The concept of selling internally and communicating internally is is for me just as an important metric.
And in the one on ones talking about that and coaching on that and and going through that concept of a team sport, who's your team on this organization, . What reservations does your sales engineer have about how we're about this proposal? Is he aligned with his boss? Have he talked to his boss? Have you talked to, your SDR to like help in this, project, who are the other internal people that you have reaching out to your customer and do they have the right messaging and have they done it? Have you held them accountable? It's highly important. It's sales 101. It's a team sport.
[:[00:21:05] David Archer: Yeah. I would question any salesperson that says I did it alone. All right. Like I, I got this sale. Nobody else was involved. It was all me. I was the one who did this. I was the one who got the lead. I, I created the marketing materials. I, I didn't copy any slide decks. I that just doesn't exist. In any win and most software companies send out a win call Around all of the people that are involved every single time There's somebody that's left off and they're and when somebody gets left off They get pissed and the reason they get pissed Is because they actually did contribute
[:[00:21:51] David Archer: In the extreme case I borrow like the same way I borrow from marines. I'm on board. I'm gonna borrow from software, right? And and when [00:22:00] you are building software so that You have a number of different areas that need to communicate and need to know what they're doing and each layer is getting built, independently, essentially, by different people, what do they do, they scrum every day, there's a software scrum, and they talk about, this is what I'm doing, here's what happened, blah, blah, blah here's how it's gonna affect you, etc.
ound Robin so that everybody [:Everybody tells us what they're doing that day. What their opinion is that day. So we start communicating.
[:[00:23:14] David Archer: So a few things,. Communication rep to rep super important. And how do you facilitate that? And how do you coach that? There is a tendency for managers to answer questions versus versus my bias is to say, great question. Call. I don't know, call so and so on this. Cause I know so and so knows especially in this world of.
Of where we're all virtual and we, we're having a weekly call. We're really, all we're talking about is your funnel. And, that's the weekly calls. A lot of it is just about me, like being able to report to the organization and you being able to hear that other people are being successful or are having problems, .
alesperson? And I talk a lot [:So that, that peer to peer interaction is critical for me. I need you to, I need you to go role play now around this topic, invite two other people invited, like Coke, I need you to go coach this SDR on how to do this. You're responsible for this piece. You now to be, you now need to be the teacher. Those type of interactions are really important to me.
[:[00:25:06] David Archer: I think overall, just be purposeful. There's so many things in my life that I've done that have, not lacked purpose but been without the concept of purpose behind it. And so make sure that you're as a leader, make sure you're thinking about how to be purposeful about what you do.
[:[00:25:44] David Archer: Yeah. On LinkedIn at David Archer. I think I'm David M. Archer at LinkedIn.
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