Regardless of a company’s size or industry, the top goal of its sales teams tends to be similar across the board: bring in more revenue this year than they did the previous one. But while the goal is simple enough, those results don’t typically come easily. 

Growth tends to be on the shortlist of a company’s general goals regardless of how prosperous it has been. Tata Technologies, a firm that specializes in outsourcing engineering services, was already generating a sizable revenue stream in 2012 before it instituted a plan to transform its sales organization from the bottom up. The company’s sales force at the time (consisting of 150 to 200 salespeople across North America, Europe, Asia, and South America) was bringing in more than $300 million in revenue and, with close to 2,000 clients, had an established customer base to work with worldwide. 

But “as any good company, [Tata Technologies wanted] to grow, so [it] can remain relevant and enduring as a force within the industry,” says Chris Weitzel, vice president of demand generation at Tata Technologies. The company introduced what it called “The Seven Pillars of Sales Transformation.” The hope was to triple its revenue to $1 billion by 2017—a goal that, while not yet realized, remains in play.  

To get there, the company had to refresh its strategy. Executives kept in mind a saying that the CEO was fond of repeating: “What got us here won’t get us there”—meaning that to reach that next level, the organization really had to think strategically about growth. For Tata Technologies, this meant putting customer demands first, then moving inward toward the company’s people, processes, and technologies. 

Though Tata Technologies is a business-to-business (B2B) outfit, there is much to be gleaned from its approach regardless of whom you are selling to. As Jim Dickie, managing partner at CSO Insights (recently acquired by MHI Global), suggests, the art of selling is much like cooking: While all chefs add their personal touches to recipes, there are certain techniques they should not have to relearn each time they step into the kitchen. 

What follows are the universal takeaways from Tata Technologies’ story, ones that can help bring sales one step closer to a shared science.

1. Focus on the Right Customers

The first step Tata Technologies took was to evaluate its offerings and determine what it needed to develop a stronger relationship with each account. To do so, the company had to make sure it was catering to the areas most in demand by customers.  

In addition, Tata Technologies had to determine exactly what type of customer it was looking for. Once it could identify a particular fit, everything else would be much easier to put into place. “When you’re trying to do a transformation like this and focus the company on what it needs to do to succeed, it really all begins with the customers [you] want to serve,” Weitzel says. 

Tata Technologies determined that the most fruitful areas were the automotive, aerospace, and industrial machinery industries. Likewise, the company was able to identify regions that were on the way up—among them Eastern Europe, which was showing growth in product development. “Refining the list of top manufacturers to work with and being really disciplined about what companies we were going to pursue is extremely difficult, but ultimately it makes all the difference,” Weitzel says. 

Since, at its core, Tata Technologies was in the business of helping companies improve their products, a great amount of trust was required between both parties. For Tata Technologies, it made the most sense to take on a partnership model that would emphasize collaboration toward common goals. Tata Technologies decided to work with only those organizations that embraced those terms, and that promised to grow with the company. With these guidelines in place, Tata Technologies was able to pare down its list of existing customers and prospects to 97 ideal companies worldwide. 

2. Configure Teams to Better Align with Strategy

Once the company determined what was needed to better serve its most desirable customers, it next had to assemble sales teams to get the job done. Often that means continually restructuring each team so that it works in accord with company goals. It also means removing barriers that inhibit much-needed collaboration. 

Tata Technologies aimed to reconfigure sections of its organization to communicate better with one another, with the goal of servicing the customer. The company had traditionally been structured in such a way that certain parts of the business were separated from others. One part of the organization, for instance, was dedicated to selling engineering service projects; another provided product-lifestyle-management-related software—software that companies use to develop, design, and manufacture their products. “There’s been great untapped value in having those two aspects of the business communicate with one another, and we had a great need to increase a lot of cross-sell between those two,” Weitzel says.  

3. Provide Appropriate Incentives that Reflect the Strategy

Of course, once a sales team is in place, it’s vital the company figures out just how to properly motivate its members. A lot of organizations might be aware of this off the bat, but it’s likely they don’t stop to consider which incentives make the most sense for their particular business. Weitzel opines that a good incentive is one that’s “psychologically motivating and reflects the company’s strategy.” Accordingly, motivational strategy often differs from one organization to the next. 

Since one of Tata Technologies’ customers is Jaguar, a good incentive for the sales team, executives figured, would be one that demonstrated the value of the account—and convinced salespeople the product is worth presenting to the world: Three exceptional performers would be given their very own Jaguar.

It was also important that incentives be geared toward areas the company was focusing on strengthening. Since one of the company’s big goals was to bolster lead generation, the company tailored incentives for this area of the pipeline. Dickie points out that all too often companies will incentivize the wrong action, or set inducements in place haphazardly. “When you deliver a compensation plan to a salesperson, you’ve got to realize that you shouldn’t be talking to the salesperson, you should be talking to the salesperson’s wallet.” If sales to existing accounts are compensated the same way as breaking new business, for example, it’s more likely a sales rep will focus on existing accounts, since these sales cycles tend to be shorter. 

And it’s not just sales teams that should be incentivized. The whole organization should be aligned on what it wants to accomplish, so it makes sense to extend motivational efforts to other teams. That’s why Tata Technologies offers incentives to its “technical solution experts” as well as its lead engineers and programmers. “These are the people that are effectively partnering with the customers, delivering the solutions,” says V. Balaji, chief information officer at Tata Technologies. 

“We always say our customers eventually buy [our] product development expertise,” Balaji adds. So each team assisting in the conversion has its own reward system in place.

4. Narrow the Offerings to Suit Customer Needs

Organizations—especially those with a vast array of product offerings—can benefit from determining what will be of most value to their customers at any given time. A company such as Tata Technologies has a lot to offer by way of solutions, but most won’t provide what every customer is looking for at a particular moment. The company took some time to really examine its offerings. “We have comprehensive solutions, but we tried to focus on what we can bring to the market that’s most valuable to [customers],” Weitzel says.

The company decided to narrow down its portfolio to the five or six products that would be most relevant to customers. To zero in on those areas, executives took a closer look at all the available data from previous work; specifically, they looked to the CRM system to read the activity and interactions with the company. “We aligned our CRM systems to track the percentage of the pipeline that was being allocated to each of [our] key solutions so that we could better understand what our customers were consuming, how are they consuming it, and what they are telling us as they start consuming this,” Balaji says. 

5. Place Emphasis on Generating Quality Leads 

As with many companies, good customers come from highly qualified leads. In this respect, the marketing team is as important to the sales cycle as the salespeople. Tata Technologies gets this, which is why it had its marketing department put a heavy focus on lead generation. Marketers were given the criteria that the organization found most relevant to its overall strategy (from the first pillar), and worked with those criteria to craft better messages. The company also invested in a marketing automation system, which allows marketers to develop better content and test it around specific campaigns to track the reactions it evoked. This enabled Tata Technologies to take the same model it used to find its 97 key customers and employ it to find prospects with similar potential value. 

And to ensure the sales force focused on high-quality leads, incentives (for both marketers and salespeople) were placed around strengthening the pipeline: The company announced it would give away Land Rovers to the top performers in each of its three territories. Any opportunities that were generated through marketing, and ultimately passed along to the salesperson before being converted to revenue, were tracked and rewarded accordingly.  

With a strengthened incentive plan, coupled with a strong marketing automation system, Tata Technologies was able to triple its number of prospects within six months of implementation. 

6. Assemble a ‘Bid Response’ Team 

What’s a great lead if you can’t act on it when it really counts? To ensure that every highly qualified lead is attended to, companies should always have the appropriate talent and materials on hand, ready to act at a moment’s notice. “What we did was identify individuals who had the required experience about what it is we do and [could] make it compelling to customers,” Weitzel says, “but also [had] the technical knowledge to be able to back that up and really craft winning proposals for us.” 

If the company finds it has a need for a particular type of engineer, it will locate that person and fly him anywhere in the world to assist with a deal. Members of what it calls the Bid Response Team are equipped with suitable materials, including reusable content such as case studies, compelling proposals, and packaged service offerings. When faced with a large and critical deal, they work in concert with some of the most seasoned, high-level executives from the strategy team.  

Of course, all of this requires that sales managers recognize which member has the required expertise to work magic in a particular situation. While there is not necessarily a perfect system for recognizing and handpicking that talent, there are steps companies can take to make it easier. 

Tata Technologies prioritizes identifying workers with strong communication skills, personality, and the knowledge necessary to close deals. To gather such an elite group, companies should give personnel the chance to stand out, Weitzel suggests. Tata Technologies has educational programs in place at universities within each of its regions where employees can study and improve their skill sets. Each year, through what the company calls the “talent pool,” candidates can prove themselves through tests that measure business acumen and strategic thinking. 

With such programs in place locally, along with recommendations from trusted colleagues within each region, Tata Technologies can recognize, nurture, and promote talent—and provide ample opportunity for employees to help themselves.

7. Organize a ‘Sales War Room’

One of the most important components of the sales transformation plan was the “sales war room”—effectively, a system for monitoring and tracking the performance of the sales teams. Executives organized biweekly meetings in which the teams reported to the CEO. 

The war room meetings enabled the company to isolate the key metrics driving performance, and determine which teams were meeting quota and which ones were struggling to adapt. And any new initiatives or changes under each of the seven pillars were proposed and evaluated in the war room. 

Companies would be well advised to organize such meetings to help them keep track of sales performance, both overall and team by team. “It helped us with two major aspects,” Weitzel says. “To both govern, and to change.”

ABC—Always Be Changing

While it’s not one of Tata Technologies’ seven pillars, there is an additional consideration that is important enough to add here. It is the impermanence of pretty much everything in the sales ecosystem. As Dickie puts it, “We’re selling at the speed of change, and we’ve got to be able to adapt.”

And in a volatile marketplace, Dickie notes, where change is bound to occur at any time—whether in the economy, the law, or technology—it’s vital to be able to anticipate it, and adjust. 

Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.