In her book The End of Competitive Advantage, Columbia Professor Rita McGrath states:

"Long term structural advantage is gone and being replaced by a series of short term transient advantages."

This means we need to do two things to survive:

• Constantly innovate.
• Get these innovations into the hands of our salespeople as soon as possible to leverage them as quickly as possible.

We’ve spoken with multiple leaders that tell us the following story:

1. We saw a competitive opportunity and developed a new product or service, acquired a new business, etc.
2. We announced our new and improved value proposition at sales kickoff.
3. Product and marketing produced playbooks and enablement took the team through rigorous sales methodology training.
4. Financial incentives were put in place.

By and large the sales team didn’t make the transition but kept selling the old value proposition and solution. 

Why is this, given the steps above taken by the organization? The #1 reason?? The confidence of the sales team. Salespeople do not want to take the risk of losing a deal or losing face having new conversations for the first time in front of a customer (even if we’re in front of them on a screen).

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Senior executives know that, beyond mergers and acquisitions, a company’s growth is driven one deal at a time by the way salespeople sell and negotiate. That’s why American companies spend $7.2 billion every year(1) on sales and negotiation methodologies. But beyond proprietary (and perhaps biased) consulting reports and high level-level academic papers on change, there’s little information available on whether those investing are actually achieving a return on their investment. 

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