Align
Learn
Do
Align Learn Do is chosen to help the Sales Effectiveness function devise a 3-year sales development framework.
Back Ground
Colt strives to transform the way the world works through the power of connectivity. The Colt IQ Network connects 900+ data centres across Europe, Asia and North America’s largest business hubs, with over 29,000 on-net buildings and growing.
The Challenge
It was clear that a significant amount of learning was taking place, but it was too generalised and didn’t meet the needs of specialisms of each role, allow for cultural differences in learning styles or take into the changes needed to make virtual delivery engaging.
In addition, it was hard to measure the efficacy and value of the learning that was taking place and the engagement of Colts 1000+ Salespeople.
The leaders of the business recognised the need to review the whole approach to sales effectiveness and engaged the team at Align, Learn Do to undertake a thorough analysis and make recommendations based on the findings.
The Solution
Tasked with getting the know the business and its employees, Align, Learn, Do used its successful framework approach to uncover needs across the business.
This included:
- Interviews with people from across the sales organisation (from account executives to regional sales directors)
- Deep dives with teams during group forums
- Research and understanding of internal systems and process
- A competitor analysis.
The work was completed in two distinct stages.
Stage 1 – Discovery
The two-stage plan involved the discovery phase, consisting of 10 individual calls with senior salespeople, 4 calls with people involved in the sales effectiveness process and 10 sales groups/teams calls took place.
Align, Learn, Do set out to find out how the current offering was viewed amongst the sales teams and how it might be improved to support the move from transactional selling to a more consultative approach.
Within the discovery phase, the team adapted the McKinsey 7s Model to ensure that key dependencies and risks were mapped into the framework.
The team identified how learning could be made specific to each role.
Stage 2 – Recommendations
Following the discovery exercise, the team at Align, Learn, Do produced a detailed report outlining recommendations for the short, medium and long term activities that would meet the core objectives:
- To define, build and document a sales wide development framework that can be applied to the worldwide sales team
- To further define the key works streams that will form the learning within the framework
- To use findings to help define appropriate sales methodologies to align with new segmentation and the development framework
- To define and document “What does good look like” for all key sales functions together with career paths
- To research, recommend and define a process for how we test, baseline and build a gap analysis of current capabilities to drive the framework
- To build a 2-3 year framework of development activity to align across account management, sales management and senior managers
- To work and align with other key partners to deliver a framework action plan.
All Objectives were met and there is now a 3 Year development framework in place for the sales effectiveness team.
Conclusion
Colt now has a defined plan of action for the workstreams in the frameworks. There is a clear understanding of the dependencies outside of the delivery of learning that can affect the framework and the known risks are mapped. The framework allows the team to monitor activity within the workstreams and provide data around the programmes back to the business to demonstrate value.
