Five actions to boost your sales organization’s resilience

Efforts to squeeze out additional sales could be more profitably invested in the sales force. Here’s how to raise morale, build capabilities, and position your team for recovery.

 
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold, many sales leaders are facing a tough choice: drive as many sales as possible today or prepare for the future. Most sales leaders are trying to do both, of course, but the intense pressures they’re feeling as economies around the world pull back create an urgency to focus on the short term.

That sense of urgency has led some companies to try to recapture lost revenues by increasing targets for their sales teams. Since many of these targets are unrealistic, they can further demoralize sales teams that are already reeling from the leap to remote selling. This state of affairs has exacerbated a tendency among sales leaders to focus on short-term performance in meeting targets and forecasts, achieving growth, and closing deals.

We believe sales leaders could better use this time as an opportunity to invest in their sales teams. By thoughtfully building up their psychological health and capabilities, sales leaders can ensure that their teams are ready to leap ahead of competitors as the economy recovers. Research and experience back this up. Recent McKinsey research into and analysis of the performance and growth strategies of approximately 2,000 companies between 2007 and 2017 reinforces how critical it is to stay focused on through-cycle growth. This is true not only to ensure long-term survival but also to generate total returns to shareholders (TRS) of 8 percent compared with their peers, who stay at about zero.

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Πηγή: mckinsey