Sales Trend 11 of the Barrett 12 Sales Trends Report for 2022 is about the role that sales leaders can play in decarbonising sales operations.
We see the sales leadership function as a supporting role, a key supporting role: sales leaders support salespeople, they support business success by ensuring expected sales outcomes and customer satisfaction and retention, and any other relevant business goals.
In that light, this trend is not about how to decarbonise sales leadership, but about how sales leadership can and should support decarbonising the sales operations in general.
From this perspective sales leadership becomes a change management role, dealing with mindsets rather than just the actual monetary or technical challenges of these changes.
We can see three key areas that need to be managed when it comes to these changes and the challenges that go with them:
- Helping find the options, opportunities, and the right methods to reduce the carbon footprint. Identifying how this can happen without adding cost, and, ideally, reducing cost.
- Helping their staff to manage the changes that come with changing the ecological footprint of the business.
- Helping their staff to cope in an environment that does support decarbonising the business.
1. Helping set up the path to decarbonising the sales operations
Middle management is regularly involved in projects to implement business goals or help identify practical and tangible measures to overarching business goals, such as “decarbonising our organisation.”
Some opportunities seem more obvious than others. The past two years have forced most salespeople into remote selling, replacing the company car with a Zoom license or pushing towards a more complex use of Microsoft Teams. This meant investing in technology and hardware, whether equipping the sales teams with better laptops, headsets, or other tools, depending on how they interact with their customers.
Reducing time on the road and spending more time in front of a webcam might be the easy part. Sales managers now needed to figure out how to adequately support their staff, which most likely will spend even less time at the office than before. The future schedule of the hybrid salesperson could be any blend of days visiting customers, home office, and the occasional day at the office. Reducing carbon emissions is not just about providing public transport passes or reorganising the office space, it is also about learning how to support, coach and motivate staff that you hardly get to see face to face anymore and that rarely come together as a team. It includes the challenge of maintaining a “team spirit” and facilitating the collaboration within geographically separated team members, or with other centralised departments, such as service or delivery teams, marketing, and other sales support and related roles.
So what can be done?
Involve the sales team actively in this process, from updating the Sales Strategy and developing a new Go-to-Market Action Plan, to organising workshops with other teams to coordinate the potential new collaborations that could surface as a result of the changing ways to run the sales operation. This is a new field for most of us, more facetted than what appears at first glance and using the wisdom and creativity of the crowd can be the most beneficial tool in this process. Also, there is a high level of awareness already around reducing emissions and if nothing else, engaging the team will give any observant sales leader some good insights as to where their sales and service people stand in this.
2. Helping their staff to manage the changes that come with decarbonising sales operations
Adapting to procedures to reduce the environmental impact of a business while still increasing sales results requires several technical, structural, and other organisational changes. But more critically, new technology requires learning new skills and behaviours. New routines require new ways to self-organise. New paradigms, like the Circular Economy (see Sales Trend 7) need to be explained and sold to customers. Approaching clients with these topics as well as shifting to remote conversations with them require different communication skills, which even experienced and otherwise successful salespeople frequently find hard to grapple with.
Sales leaders will have to deal with unhappy team members who struggle with anything from adapting to the technology to overcoming old views and stereotypes around “the way we’ve been selling here for years”. This needs its own kind of training and coaching, and sales leaders are in the best position to facilitate that. However, this is not a traditional sales topic they might be used to support their staff with, but a subject that requires sensitive and authentic communication skills around promoting values and benefits with potentially low tangibility at first glance. As mentioned by one business leader in the survey we conducted before writing this report, “our teams are clients as well”.
While “reducing our carbon footprint” might be seen as a positive message by a lot of customers, sales leaders will also have to deal with a few customers unwilling to support the changes that come with that. While banning plastic straws or shopping bags went smoothly in many parts of the world, reports of indignant customers made it into the news each time such restrictions came into place, nonetheless. Any business that deploys measures that will affect how they deal with customers, -how they will be serviced and supported- will need to prepare for at least some fallout, such as customers complaining or threatening to leave.
3. Helping staff to cope in an environment that supports decarbonising the sales operation.
We occasionally hear about cases where sales leaders have to manage the reverse problem: Sales teams eager to change, adapt and improve their environmental impact are being stalled by top management reluctant to invest in any change. “Never change a winning horse” still seems to be the mindset at least around the C-level of some organisations. Turning the car fleet over to hybrid or e-vehicles sounds like an expensive measure that doesn’t render a significant reduction in cost in return. Angering some key customers with changes that throw everyone out of their beloved routines sounds like a major risk to some top executives. A case for not striving towards decarbonising sales operations can always be made easily – at least with some anecdotal evidence.
For sales leaders, this poses potential challenges, from keeping up the motivation of their staff to the retention of top performers who are eager not only to earn a good salary but also purposefully serve a company, in line with their own values and identity. The trend in the US in late 2021 for a lot of workers not returning to their jobs, or quitting them because they don’t find purpose or at least a decent work culture should serve as a warning that a decent salary might not be enough to hold your staff, whether it’s a waiter in hospitality or an academic in a high-performance role[1].
If sales leadership is about support, then this support is not just about helping the different stakeholder groups they are dealing with, such as sales teams, the top executive level, or customers for example, but also about being a facilitator and mediator in any clashes in interests and goals between those parties. As such, their role is no different to what was before, it’s only this time they will probably need new skills to deal with them, and the stakes have never been higher.
Author: Jens Hartmann, Head of Learning and Development – Barrett
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-31/ok-boomer-lying-flat-has-been-a-long-time-coming-for-millennials
Stories from the field
I used the `phone conversation structure’ and I have a meeting with a client I thought was not going to re-engage with us. The client was very positive and stated she wants to work with us moving forward.
Wow. This good feeling may become addictive.
(a day after the first session of a 2-day workshop)
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