A change is only as good as its foundation.

Why everybody starts with the tool

The finest KPI board is worth nothing if your salespeople are not selling anyway.

Yet almost every sales transformation starts exactly there. New system, new processes, new metrics. And for understandable reasons. A tooling project has a beginning, an end and a budget. You can explain it to a board, you can write it into a project plan, and after four weeks there is a progress bar. A stocktake has none of that.

Research on sales excellence development describes typical intervention patterns in companies. One of them is called the analyst. This group sits at headquarters, leads from the top and relies above all on aligning strategy and sales, on sales performance management and on CRM. Its strength is systematics, but this group also often contains desk-bound perpetrators. (Belz et al. 2018)

The problem here is not the tool. A CRM is a good tool. The problem is the order.

The number nobody in sales wants to hear

A study from St. Gallen examined 747 companies from 14 countries to find out what separates the top ten per cent from the bottom ten per cent. At the end stood ten characteristics. (Dannenberg and Zupancic, cited in Zupancic 2023)

The CRM system is in tenth place. In first place is the standing that sales enjoys inside its own company.

That is uncomfortable, because you cannot buy it. It appears in no quotation and it has no rollout phase. Add to that a second finding from the same study, just as uncomfortable. It is not the presence of CRM software that separates the best from the average, but its consistent use for customer analysis and systematic account work. So the software is not the lever. The behaviour around it is.

The same picture appears when you ask managers directly which levers they consider the most important. They name the qualification of salespeople first and closeness to people and customers second. Sales metrics and KPIs land almost at the bottom in an environment that believes in measurement. (Belz et al. 2018)

I do not want to make these numbers harder than they are. Both are cross-sectional studies, they show correlations and not causes. That good companies have a good sales image may also mean that success creates the image and not the other way round. The authors concede that themselves. But the ranking remains remarkable, precisely because it runs so contrary to the usual order of investment.

What the data does not show

The data shows you what happens. Why it happens, no report will tell you.

The study on sales excellence development contains a passage on this that I consider the most interesting. Managers and salespeople were surveyed separately, and their priorities diverge. An example shows why that makes rankings so treacherous. If both groups place the alignment of strategy and sales in third position, it looks like consensus. Only then, perhaps, management complains that good strategies are not being implemented, while the salespeople consider the same strategies unrealistic or wrong. Same priority, same topic, opposite diagnosis. (Belz et al. 2018)

Anyone who only looks at the ranking finds a consensus. Anyone who talks to both sides finds the conflict.

I have an example from a process analysis in mind that shows the same thing. A car manufacturer recorded and mapped an approval process in detail. The weaknesses identified were, without exception, communication and interface problems. Decisions taken were not passed on systematically. A regular meeting for change information had been suspended at some point and never resumed. An entire team was not involved in decisions that affected it. None of that sits in a system. All of it you learn in four conversations. (Lecture on process management, TH Ingolstadt 2024)

How much the diagnosis decides the measure is shown particularly cleanly by a dissertation at WHU. Based on 122 usable responses from a cleaned sample of 562 B2B companies, it tested what actually explains problems in acquiring new customers. A lack of consulting competence among individual salespeople contributes no significant explanation. A lack of support through training and problems in coordination towards key accounts do. Upskilling individual salespeople is therefore no cure-all. (Böhm 2025)

A company with this problem would probably have booked sales training for the individuals. Not wrong. Just not the lever.

The first thirty days

When I take over a sales organisation, the first thirty days therefore belong to analysis. The concept emerges in parallel rather than afterwards, and from the preliminary conversations I usually already have a fair idea of what it is about. What I do not yet know is which measure will actually hit.

1. Understand what the company actually sells. Not the brochure, but what the customer gets for it in the end. At a Swiss machine-tool manufacturer, up to seventy per cent of the services that sales considered particularly relevant to customers were unknown to those customers. (Zupancic 2023) Between what a company believes it sells and what arrives at the customer lies often more than you think.

2. Walk through the processes and assess them. Four questions are enough to start. How do the processes currently run. Where are the bottlenecks. Who is responsible for this step. Where is work duplicated. Of interest above all are the core processes, the ones the customer perceives and that decide profitability and competitiveness. Support and steering processes come later. (Ottenlips 2025)

3. Talk with the people, not about them. Whoever works with a process every day knows how it really runs, regardless of what the documentation says. That is the part that can least be shortcut and yields the most. I sit down with them and listen, and I ask what annoys them.

4. Ask customers and partners. The outside view corrects the inside view. A sales team that considers itself strong in consulting, and a customer who feels poorly looked after, are two descriptions of the same relationship. Only one of them pays.

5. Review the data and interpret it. Not just read it. And with a realistic expectation of what there is to be had. Process mining promises data-driven analysis instead of subjective assessment and shows the real as-is state of a process. But it requires that the process leaves digital traces in systems. A sales operation that runs on telephone, email and gut feeling leaves none. Anyone who wants to use the tool must first do the work the tool is meant to make visible. (Ottenlips 2025)

Repair is not transformation

That expressly does not mean that nothing happens for thirty days. What is obviously broken, I tackle immediately. If enquiries sit for days because nobody is responsible, you do not need to wait for a stocktake.

But that is repair, not transformation. The difference is not semantic. A repair removes a symptom everybody can see. A transformation changes how an organisation works, and for that you have to know why it works the way it does.

Change therefore has to start with the structures. A rousing speech stays ineffective if working-time rules, the incentive system and annual targets demand the opposite behaviour. (Kaehler 2025) Elsewhere I have described how a target system punishes a salesperson for being honest in a customer meeting. Structures like that are not found in a dashboard. You find them when you ask why somebody does something that is obviously absurd, and get the answer that for them it is entirely rational.

What happens when you skip the stocktake

Process management has a sober warning about this. It is quite possible to achieve good results quickly. But there is the danger of not having examined, or of having completely overlooked, the causes of bottlenecks and weaknesses, and then the problems get worse very fast. (Ottenlips 2025)

In change management the same thing appears as a number. In a survey of around one thousand German-speaking companies on the causes of failed change, employee resistance leads with thirty per cent, poor process control follows with twenty-five, and in third place with twenty per cent is a pace of change that was too fast. Unclear objectives come after that with twelve per cent. (Hernstein Institute, cited in Lauer 2019)

Too fast, then, is more often a cause of failure than unclear.

There is a story that is fondly told in change management and usually remembered the wrong way round. A manager suspects that money is being burned in his purchasing department. He does not shake anybody awake. He has things counted. In the end 424 different work gloves lie on the table, exactly two kinds are needed, and the same glove costs a good three dollars in one plant and over ten in another. Only then does he nail all 424 to a board and put it in the boardroom, and from then on he has to convince nobody. (Kotter and Cohen 2002)

What is remembered is the board. What did the work was the counting.

Where it then begins

When the thirty days are over, I have the complete picture. I know where the lever is. Sometimes it really is the process. Often it is something else entirely, and then the finest system landscape will not help.

And then I do not start with the biggest problem. I start where two conditions are met. It has a tangible effect on the targets, and it can be changed without great dependence on other departments. Pilot teams in the transformation of mid-sized companies are selected on this principle, and it works just as well in sales. (Toborek 2025) A team that has once seen that something really moves carries the big rebuild afterwards. One that waits six months for the first result does not.

Which is why the tool does not come first. A change is only as good as the foundation it stands on.