Summary of Client’s Challenge
The head of the sales department for a regional health plan provider learned that they were not meeting their assigned sales goals. In addition, it had become apparent that his team’s cultural dynamics were less than what he had hoped they would be.
Change by Design was hired to consult on potential avenues for solving the cultural dynamics and sales deficiencies that were resulting by internal conflict.
Anonymous Interviews and Surveys to Reduce Self-Selection Data Bias
Our instructional designers started by seeking to understand each team member’s perspective about the sales process. It also allowed them to get to know us, and develop the basis for a cooperative relationship that could unlock useful information. Our team developed and deployed an interview protocol, meeting with each person individually, but in a similar format with consistent exploratory questions.
Trust was very important to this part of the process, so we promised anonymity to everyone involved. And we continued to reiterate that promise in each of our meetings so that they would feel safe enough to honestly share their perceptions and thoughts about underlying problems in the sales department.
Quantitative Analysis of Data Gathering from Interviews Before Group Meeting
Our team then analyzed the results to identify patterns that would help determine useful intervention. This helped provide guideposts in the next phase of the project, which was meeting with the entire team for a day-long set of discussions. Facilitators employed Change by Design’s proprietary strategic problem solving workshop format, and the team was able to evaluate the entire sales process, including processes in other departments whose products fed into the sales department.
The result was group discovery of the main reason for sales department number shortfalls. The data and discussion clearly isolated the issue to external inputs, validating that the cause of performance issues did not actually stem from anything the sales team was doing. Instead, there were communication challenges in other departments, whose missing or inaccurate information was creating a critical failure in the overall process because of how vital it was to the sales team’s overall effectiveness.
Additional Cultural Insights Gleaned By Collaborative Problem-Solving
Although the core challenge to sales performance was deemed non-internal, discussions yielded another interesting result. During the group discussion of challenges the sales department had been facing in terms of its culture, one of the individuals attending self-selected themselves out of the department. The colleague realized that they might be on the “right bus”, but not in the “right chair. ” Therefore, they decided to seek a position elsewhere in the company and left on good terms.
Summarizing Report with Action Plan Steps
To wrap up the work on this project, Change by Design delivered a summarizing report. The report included action plan steps that would correctly address the sales shortfall. This provided the department head a solid basis for process and procedure changes with their counterparts at the leadership level.
Contact Change by Design today if you need an independent third-party business process improvement vendor that is adept at helping facilitate multi-departmental change management, strengthen company cultural competency, and better align your workforce to targeted organizational results.