From products to solutions, with everyone in the right place in a newly composed team
At a division of an international group, the new growth strategy asked for different competencies from the commercial team. The shift from selling products to selling solutions touches how salespeople open the conversation with the client and how they build value. It touches just as much how the team performs as a whole. The question: where does the team stand today, where can it go, and how should the team be structured to carry that strategy?
The strategy shifted faster than the work could follow. Selling solutions asks for a deeper understanding of the client and a broader interpretation of the role, but there was no shared view of what was already there. As a result, every decision about deployment, development and succession landed at management level, and stayed there: nobody wanted to jump to hasty conclusions about who fits where.
On top of that, an exercise like this touches on more than competencies. Anyone who hears that their role asks for a different interpretation, also hears something about themselves: what can I do and not, do I stay where I am, do I move forward or a step sideways. Those questions touch people's identity, and as long as they stay unspoken, they hold every decision back.
A capability review of the entire commercial team, operational and managerial. For each employee a picture emerged of strengths, development points, potential, drivers and future expectations, coupled with a team analysis that showed where the strengths lay and which development needs called for attention through training and coaching.
Those insights fed individual development plans, talent and succession planning, and recommendations about people and business: which competencies to grow internally, which to attract externally, and how to deploy the talent that was already there in the best way. On that basis a new team structure was also determined, in which every employee ended up in the place that matched their strengths and ambition.
As determining as the assessment itself was the conversation about it: letting people see what the findings about their potential meant, so they could understand and accept their strengths and their limits, even when that meant their role changed or precisely stayed the same.
The moment when the big strategic shift broke down into a series of workable choices: this employee gets this development, this role calls for this profile, this gap is filled externally. That worked because people had first been able to accept their own place in that story. Because there was a clear story per person, the team could connect with the new strategy.
Decisions about deployment, development and succession became concrete and supported. Management got something to hold on to for questions about leadership, growth and team composition, and everyone understood why they were in that place in the team.
There stood a team with a new structure, deliberately built to make the new sales strategy happen.
Transformation programme led
International organisation, private sector