Company mergers occur almost daily. While such moves both scare and excite employees, one thing is almost always certain to happen: culture change.

A merged company typically adopts the acquiring company's processes, products or organizational strategy. The change means learning a different way of working and thinking.

That's what a product-based sales team experiences when a company decides to offer services. So how can you help a sales team change?

Current Marketing Challenge

How do you train sales to sell services?

I just suffered a big setback when I tried to train my product sales force to sell services at my company. We did a pilot in Texas, and the consultant we used had no hands-on experience selling services and tried to teach a 10-day course in two days, using old field-training, basic-sales stuff.

The feedback on the course was horrible! How could I have handled this differently? What experiences have readers had selling services when they previously have only sold products? What is the best way to train your staff to sell services?

—James, VP of professional services

Management won't be surprised when employees don't buy into the change. Furthermore, sales teams have more challenges today than in the past, because customers have become choosier about their wants and needs. However, businesses can take steps to ease the pain of change, based on the following reader suggestions:

  • Adjust your compensation plan.
  • Train the sales force.
  • Offer, don't sell.

Next Marketing Challenge

How to develop management skills and sell them on a resume.

Click here to offer your advice or here to ask a question.

Adjust your compensation plan

Selling services requires a different approach from selling products. Similarly, compensation should change to fit the service model, as Free Yee, president of FoundPages, explains:

In my 20 years of sales experience and management, I've noticed two things—sales people sell what sells, and they sell what pays them more, faster. So to move to services, I've tried to make it easier for them to sell services by bundling/packaging, for example, and by making sure the compensation plan for the service offering was attractive, if not more attractive than for the product offering. Usually, sales can sell services, but they (like everyone else) start the day off selling what they did (or sold) yesterday.

If a company wants its sales team to sell more services and fewer products, your compensation and performance package makes a great motivator.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hank Stroll (Hank@InternetVIZ.com) is publisher at InternetVIZ, a custom publisher of 24 B2B e-newsletters reaching 490,000 business executives.