How Much Sales Development Can Leadership Do In-House?

You can mow your own lawn, plant your own shrubs, paint your own house, repair your own car, and clean your own house.  You can do your own accounting, write your own agreements, and generate your own payroll too.  But you probably don’t do most of these things.  Professionals do a much better job and save you a tremendous amount of time.

From time to time, clients want to handle some of the services we provide in-house.  “Why can’t we do the sales process ourselves?”  They can, but a few questions come to mind.  If they didn’t have an effective, efficient, optimized, formal, structured sales process for the last 20 years, where would this expertise suddenly come from to create this process tomorrow?  What if they get it wrong?

“Daily huddles sound simple enough.  Why can’t we do that on our own?”  They can, but there is also the matter of getting the salespeople to participate, embrace the huddles and find them useful and important.  Much of that is dependent upon getting the metrics and the huddle format right.

“We have people who can provide sales training and we expect them to do it.”  Most companies with in-house trainers often don’t realize that while their trainers’ expertise is training, the subtleties and nuances of selling, and the sales weaknesses that must be overcome, require skills and experience that in-house trainers usually lack.

Beyond these obvious challenges exists a 600 pound gorilla.  The reason that any of these examples would be implemented at a company is usually to improve the sales culture, generate additional revenue and improve sales effectiveness.  Salespeople usually resist efforts to change things up.  When you combine resistant salespeople with homegrown solutions and don’t get it correct the first time (right out of the gate and I mean nail it), you’ll have an even bigger problem on your hands.  You won’t get a second chance to tweak and get it right.  You get one chance to state your case, introduce the changes and get salespeople to embrace them.  If you don’t know what you’re doing, can’t back it up with science, or fail to make a case and impress your salespeople, you’re dead in the water, in a worse place than where you started, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Don’t risk it.  Leave sales force evaluations, sales process, recruiting process, selection criteria, sales and sales management training, CRM selection, sales management coaching, and sales culture change to the experts.  You’ll be glad you did.