Even when our clients are thinking about a full-scale rollout, we recommend they consider a pilot first.
Rolling out a new sales methodology or a new culture across an entire sales organization is a significant undertaking. It understandably makes leadership nervous. Even when everyone agrees the change is the right one, asking every team to adopt it at the same time means betting the whole organization on something that hasn’t been tested yet. If it doesn’t land the way you hoped, you’ve disrupted your entire sales force to learn that lesson.
Pilot programs are worth the extra planning. A pilot gives you a controlled way to see how a team actually responds to a new sales process before you commit to it at company-wide level. Pilots also give you a chance to work out the kinks in how you roll it out, so that when it’s time to scale, you’re working from evidence instead of a hunch.
Running a pilot well takes more than choosing a team and hoping for the best. We outlined the approach we recommended to make sure your pilot sets you up for success.
Start with strong leaders, not just strong performers
It’s tempting to hand a pilot to your best-performing teams because they are high achievers. We would caution against. Using high performers can backfire if they make it wildly successful (because they are so good) or they reject it entirely (because they don’t want to mess with their approach). You’re not likely to learn what you want to learn.
The better path is to select leaders who are respected and who care about improvement. Oftentimes they are the future stars on the leadership team, rather than the seasoned veteran. Find leaders who believe in what the organization is trying to accomplish so they can explain the “why” to their team in a way that builds real buy-in. They need to keep people focused when the new approach feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable. They also need to get their team excited about the opportunity to shape the company’s approach through pilot, rather than having them feel like guinea pigs.
That kind of leadership, more than raw performance history, is what determines whether a pilot succeeds or quietly fizzles out.
Give the pilot a realistic timeline
We recommend a minimum of sixty (60) days of working within the new systems and behaviors before you draw any conclusions. That clock should only start once training is fully complete. It’s a mistake to begin measuring results the moment training begins since the team is still getting comfortable with the new approach.
Say you’re launching a pilot in July. Training runs through the end of the month, which means your 60-day evaluation window should begin in August. That distinction sounds small, but it has a real effect on whether your results reflect the process itself or just the awkwardness of learning something new.
Establish clear performance benchmarks
Before you can say whether a pilot worked, everyone involved needs to agree on what “working” actually looks like. We recommend narrowing this down to the two to four metrics that matter most for your business, and then pulling two different sets of comparison data for each one: a 12-month trailing average, and performance from that same period the previous year.
Both of these comparisons matter. Relying on a single point of comparison, like last month’s numbers, leaves you exposed to seasonality. If your pilot happens to run during a naturally strong or naturally slow stretch, that seasonal swing can make the new process look far more or less effective than it really is. Looking at it from both angles, the trailing average and the same period a year ago, gives you a much more honest read on what’s actually driving the results. There are many factors that are involved with the results.
Compare against a control group
Alongside your pilot team, identify a group of comparable teams that aren’t going through the new training, and track their performance across that same window. The point isn’t to prove the pilot team is better than everyone else; it’s to isolate whether any improvement you see actually came from the new process, rather than from a strong quarter that would have happened anyway.
To make that comparison meaningful, try to strip out as much variability as you can. Look at the same metrics over the same time period, ideally with a similar number of salespeople on each team. That way you’re comparing like with like rather than drawing conclusions from teams that were never really equivalent to begin with.
Collect feedback directly from the people who lived it
Numbers alone won’t tell you the whole story. A pilot isn’t complete until you’ve sat down with the sales leaders and salespeople who went through it and asked them directly what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d change if they had to do it again. This conversation matters!
That feedback serves two purposes. First, it helps you sanity-check whether the pilot is genuinely on track in ways the metrics might not fully capture. Next, it gives you the granular detail you’ll need if you decide to roll the process out more broadly. The teams that went first will have already run into the friction points everyone else is about to hit, and their input is often the difference between a smooth company-wide rollout and one that repeats the same mistakes at a larger scale.
Put these pieces together and the value of a pilot becomes obvious. Instead of asking your entire sales force to trust the approach, you’re able to build a clearer picture of how your team might function in the future. If the picture looks good, the case to continue is much to make. If the results are unclear or negative, you can avoid a broader disruption that may not be worth the effort or cost.
