Selling Through Someone Else: How to Use Agile Sales Networks and Partners to Sell More

Section V

Empowering Employees for Selling Success

In the final section of our book, we devote our attention to the dimension that's arguably most critical to the success of the Agile Selling model: people.

For years, sales leaders have faced serious challenges when it comes to the sales workforce. They have trouble finding the right people, keeping them when they do, helping them build the right skills, and improving their performance. In fact, it's not a stretch to say that most sales leaders have a severe talent crisis—which is not an attractive scenario when the pressure is on to continually beat last quarter's numbers.

And it doesn't get any easier when selling through a new model that introduces more and more complex sales relationships and a whole new set of talent challenges companies must conquer.

In Section V, we take a look at what leading companies are doing to improve all aspects of the sales talent life cycle—from recruiting and hiring, to training and developing, to performance management, to retention. We discuss considerations for modifying talent strategies and operating models to accommodate Agile Selling, as well as creating a robust analytics competency and modifying learning programs to build the competencies and skills that can help the new approach succeed. We also review some of the key steps necessary to implement new talent initiatives in a coordinated approach that creates the genuine behavioral change across channel operations, sales operations, and ...