Do you have Sales X-Factor?

In part 1 of my blog on what makes star sales professionals, I discussed the need to understand the human mind – how do they react under different situations and make decisions as key to being successful. While that’s important, its only one piece of a two part puzzle. The other is how do a set of human with different minds of their own interact in an organizational set-up and under different situations? What behaviors from you will drive an entire ecosystem to work alongside you and who/what will they depend on to make their decisions? The answer to this lies in a deep understanding of organization psychology and how different divisions come together to achieve various objectives.

Doing these things well will give you enough time to formulate your pitch, sharpen the articulation and leave behind those one or two key messages which will linger on & get you in the reckoning.

Let me give you an example

A large telecom provider is facing a tepid business environment which drives a radical change towards productivity and efficiency improvement. There is a huge focus across business and technology on cost reduction through rationalization of people, automation and process improvement. The organizational structure was streamlined removing several layers.

Understand the organizational context

There is huge sense of insecurity across the organization. Given the focus on productivity and efficiency, the historical operating model carries a negative context and everyone associated with that is perceived adversely. This includes the people within the customer organization as well as those outside linked to the legacy ways of working.  The new team is goaled with challenging the ways of working.

Take time to understand your key stakeholder’s current context of decision making

It’s very important to understand what objectives each organization unit within your customer serves. What is the current context of the key stakeholders within those divisions? What are their alignment and interaction mechanisms with other divisions?

What should be your strategy?

If you are the incumbent partner, how should your strategy change?

-          Acknowledge the change first

-          Understand the organizational structure, get a sense of individual measures of success

-          Critical to understand your customers new org culture since that will be a derivative of how and who they decide to go with.

-          Has the org culture changed? How are people rewarded? Is it conservative or taking risks is good

-          Depending on your understanding of how different divisions within your customer interact, your strategy and execution structures will need to vary.