Changing The Sales Culture

Changing the sales culture of a 100 plus year old company is challenging.  Most of our relationships with our customers had been with the security and facilities organizations in Financial Institutions.  We had begun to establish some relationships with the retail bank as we developed the pneumatic tube and remote drive in banking business.  However we determined through many discussions with financial institutions and our consultants study that we needed to now learn to communicate with the marketing, retail, and systems organizations.  In addition as we were developing this market, we needed to elevate our contacts within financial institutions to the mid and upper management levels. 

The new sales specialists we were hiring would help us make these changes in disciplines’, but we knew that penetrating higher up in the organization would require the time and efforts of myself, the most senior managers in the field, and our upper management.

Since I had been working in the field for a couple of years developing the new drive in banking product line, I concentrated on the senior level Area Managers in the field.  I asked them to get me appointments with senior level managers at the large and medium size Financial Institutions.  We went in as a team, which was, myself, the Area Manager, the Diebold representative assigned to the account, and the ATM specialist for that region.  I wanted to make sure that all of our personnel involved with the account were introduced at these levels.  Earl, Ray, and Joe, our National Sales Manager, also participated in this process by arranging introductions where they had previous relationships.  They also joined us on a number of calls in the field. 

There were also a number of traditional events that helped this process.  At all the major conventions we hosted several luncheons for the senior level managers of financial institutions at very prestigious restaurants.  Because Ray was an avid baseball fan, we owned season tickets to all major league teams, and bought tickets to all playoff and World Series games.  Finally, we hosted an annual Christmas luncheon for all New York Financial Institution executives at the 21 Club.  Now all the ATM specialists and myself were included in these events.

As a result of all this effort, our sales organization was introduced to a higher level, which enabled them to get the audiences they needed to persuade prospects to consider Diebold as their supplier of ATMs.  This was a courageous task for many of them because their current contacts were not happy with them going ever their heads.  Fortunately, because they were an experienced sales force, in the majority of cases, they were able to manage the situation.

I do not want to leave you with the impression that we forced this strategy on them.  Prior to initiating the plan, we all spent a great deal of time in meetings, both group and one on one, explaining the reason and expected results of our plans.  We also made sure we listened to their concerns and adjusted were their recommendations made sense.  I felt that by the time we initiated our activities we were in sync and would be successful.  It did accomplish our goals.  I think some of the specific experiences might be interesting and educational.  I will discus them in the next chapter.

Lessons learned:

1.  Changing a culture requires good communications and support from all levels of management.

2.  Using entertainment allows you to establish more informal relationships that are very helpful.

3.  Allowing the people who will be effected the most be part of the planning process helps the process of culture change.

4.  Approaching the customer as a team, demonstrates to the customer that this is a company not individual program, and has the full support of management.

5.  Finally, we realized that this approach assisted our sales efforts in all product lines.