“Yes, now is a good time Glenn, to restoke the fire on our old conversations from last year around the next steps in our sales team optimisation pursuit”. “Always happy to have that chat, Peter”, I quipped with alacrity.

Peter and his company, a well known leader of a range of products and services supplied into construction and building, has been on our prospect radar off and on for 2-3 years. As Peter explained to me, the latest hiatus was because ………. “Glenn, we had to get our sales team KPIs redesigned, sorted and properly embedded into our salesforce.com. Now that is done, I think we are ready now to sit down with you and discuss what next for sales team optimisation”.

Gong!

Peter is a top chap, sharp and good as a Head of Sales in this sort of space. A good operator. But this egg-and-chicken thinking is endemic across Australian B2B sales organisation Head-of-Sales thinking. Sales team optimisation is (should be) holistic, with elements like KPI design being an example of an element. So, the risk that Peter runs by conducting his executions in this sequence is that his sales team optimisation may subsequently reveal that his KPI design and associated CRM coding is , in fact, sub-optimised as an element within the holistic sales system.

The great awakening and siren call for all such sales organisations is to run sales team optimisation as an integral part of whole-of-company annual budgeting …….. the first and foremost and top priority non-negotiable in how to mobilise the sales team. Everything else then come second.