Most companies wait too long to bring in outside help.
Not because they can’t see the problem, but because they’re not sure the problem is big enough to justify the investment. Usually, if a company decides not to work with us it is to wait out the problem, not go with another sales performance company.
Bringing in a partner can feel like admitting something isn’t working, but that type of thinking could be holding you back. Before you ever pick up the phone, there are a few honest questions you should ask yourself.
Start with the two big ones
Do you have a clearly defined sales methodology?
I’m not asking whether you have a good sales team. I’m asking whether that team knows exactly what’s expected of them. Does everyone agree on what a great sales conversation looks like? Does your salesperson know what a great experience feels like for the buyer they’re talking to?
If you can’t answer that clearly, that’s usually a sign.
Building a sales process internally is harder than it sounds. It’s difficult to be objective about your own organization, and it’s difficult to build something that works broadly across an entire team. An outside firm brings perspective you simply can’t get from the inside. That doesn’t mean companies can’t pull it off, but you have to ask yourself how big the problem currently is.
Do you have a coaching culture?
By coaching culture, I mean something specific. Have your frontline sales leaders been trained on a coaching framework? Do they follow a defined model when they work with their reps?
If they don’t, that’s another fundamental gap. Even in the age of AI and all the support tools available today, a sales manager who can actually coach is still one of the biggest drivers of performance. You will might be able to improve sales a little bit without coaching, but you certainly will not be able to sustain better performance without a clear structure.
And coaching isn’t just about having a model. It’s about cadence. When are your leaders coaching? How often? A predictable, repeatable schedule of development for your reps matters just as much as the framework itself.
The question of speed
If you are lacking either of these two pillars above, you need help. The question is whether you can do it yourself or you need someone from the outside to do it.
That decision comes down to one simple factor: speed.
Most companies we deal with have talented leadership teams who are capable of tackling some of these foundational needs. That one of the reasons why we provide a step-by-step guide to building the framework yourself, so companies can use the resources they already have.
The question is can your internal team do it fast enough to get the results you want. All those current employees have a day job. If you want to tackle a big project like this, asking your people to drop their normal work and invest serious time is hard. It pulls them out of their rhythm. The important new thing ends up competing with the urgent everyday thing, and usually the everyday thing wins.
Ask yourself, “How quickly do you need to see improvement and many people do you need to reach?”
If the answer is fast and a lot, an outside partner can give you something your team can’t easily create on its own: surge capacity. They’re often not doing something radically different from what your team is capable of. The partner is adding capability and resourcing so you can move much more quickly than you could alone.
The bottom line
You don’t need outside help for everything. If you have big gaps, you need to acknowledge those. This is when it makes sense to start considering bringing in some additional support.
But, when it comes time to fight for budget, your decision will come down to timing and scale. Can you drive the change you want with everyone you need to impact with your current team?
The companies that get the most out of a sales performance partner accept the limitations their team might have and want to see results quickly.
