The first change has to fill the pipeline.

The question every salesperson asks

As a salesperson I had the same question in mind with every change. What does this do to my pipeline?

I liked training. New tools too, if they were any good. But not in the fourth quarter, and not at the expense of my customer meetings. That was not laziness. It was a calculation everybody in sales makes every month, because a good part of their own income depends on it.

Today I rebuild sales organisations. And I put exactly that question to every measure before I set it in motion.

The first part of this series was about the first thirty days, about analysis, data and above all conversations. What comes out of them is not a tool but the knowledge of where the lever sits. This part is about what follows, the first move.

Rebuilding with the heart still beating

Change in sales is open-heart surgery. Revenue has to keep flowing while the rebuild happens, and ideally it should grow. The rebuild is done with the same people who are meant to hit their number at the same time. Sales cannot pause, and it cannot spend days adjusting to something new while customers wait.

Even when the transformation officially sits at the top of the list, it is not the real priority. The money is. Behind this sits a conflict. Quarterly reporting breeds short-termism, while change takes years and first lowers productivity and profitability. (Lauer 2019)

On top of that, time in sales is scarce before anybody changes anything. According to Gartner, sales staff spend only around 30 per cent of their time in direct customer interaction, and Salesforce arrives at 28 per cent in its survey. (Gartner 2024; Salesforce 2024) The rest goes on preparation, administration and research. Every additional task comes out of those 30 per cent.

And most teams have already had plenty of change. According to Gartner, an employee went through ten planned enterprise changes on average in 2022. In 2016 it was two. (Ó Morain and Aykens 2023)

An older German survey shows why managers often underestimate this. Only 11 per cent of employees experienced change as energising, 40 per cent as draining. Among managers, 33 per cent found it energising, three times as many. (osb international 2012, cited in Lauer 2019)

👉 Whoever plans the rebuild experiences it differently from those who carry it day to day.

Why your team pushes back, and why it is right to

Three reasons come up again and again, and none of them is stubbornness.

Nobody gives up what has been working. A salesperson knows their approach brings in money, because they can check it every month. Psychology knows two mechanisms for this. People suppress or devalue contradictory information, and they only look for alternatives once real dissatisfaction sets in. (Festinger and Simon, cited in Lauer 2019) In sales both bite harder, because the old approach is not just familiar, it demonstrably worked.

The benefit of a measure is often not visible. In production a reject rate falls or it does not. In sales it frequently stays unclear whether a measure helps the salesperson or mainly produces data for management. The suspicion is not far-fetched. In agency theory, sales control systems exist precisely to monitor the competences, activities and results of salespeople. (Alt 2025)

In sales, everybody has an opinion. That is my observation, not a study. Only people who know a machine discuss how it should be set. Half the company joins in on the right way to reach a customer.

For the first move this leads to a clear condition. It must not cost the sales team anything, neither time nor income. Better still, it brings something.

Your first move is in your numbers

After the analysis, actual figures are on the table. Some existed already, some you collected. Renewal rate, churn, share of cross-selling, response time to enquiries, development of revenue growth. None of it is hard to measure.

I work with a KPI catalogue along the buying phases, with five metrics each from the early phase to after-sales. Metrics differ a great deal in how quickly they react. A response time shows a change immediately. Customer lifetime value shows it after years.

👉 For the first move I therefore pick a metric that moves within weeks.

Renewal rate and cross-selling rate do. Churn and customer lifetime value take quarters to years, and total revenue depends on everything anyway. Tie the first move to a slow number and you only know a year later whether you were right, with nothing to show in the meantime.

Two things go with it. A few metrics are enough, two will do to start, because too many overload the team. And alongside, a Net Promoter Score can be set up within days to show, next to the monetary view, whether the change also lands well with customers.

A worked example with renewal and cross-selling

Suppose the renewal rate is 75 per cent where 85 would be normal. Renewal quotations go out four weeks before expiry.

Now you can take service and sales apart, redraw processes and spend half a year on it. Or you start two quarters earlier.

Four weeks before the contract ends, only the price is still open. Next year’s budget has long been allocated, the competitor has already been in, and there is no time for evidence such as an assessment or a pilot. If an escalated ticket is still open as well, nobody talks about more.

Two quarters earlier the same meeting is a different conversation. And this is where the real return lies, because moving the date alone only secures the base. The additional revenue comes from cross-selling. In a modular portfolio almost every customer uses only a section, and almost every customer has a deadline from a regulation or an audit in the calendar that pushes a topic up the list anyway. Know both and you are not selling, you are arriving with the right thing at the right time.

Cross-buying potential and loyalty potential count explicitly as components of customer value in their own right. (Rudolph-Sipötz and Tomczak 2001, cited in Zupancic 2023) In practice exactly this part often gets left behind, because the one fixed occasion of the year is spent on the price discussion.

For the sales team the arithmetic is simple. No new market, no cold calling, no marketing budget. The extra effort is a conversation that happens anyway, and the win rate is higher than in new business because trust and the buying route are already in place.

👉 It fills the pipeline instead of draining it.

Why this is more than a motivational trick

What small wins achieve has been described for a long time. A series of concrete, complete outcomes of moderate importance forms a pattern that attracts allies and quietens opponents. A problem framed too large, by contrast, creates so much pressure that it tends to block action. (Weick 1984)

Add to that a rule that is rarely followed. Look for quick wins specifically where the initiative benefits the sceptics. (Lauer 2019) A pulled-forward renewal with cross-selling does exactly that, it lands directly in the target attainment of those who doubt most.

A rough distribution cited around agile sales organisations fits here. About a fifth oppose any change, 14 per cent drive it, and 65 per cent come along in the end. (Miller and Proctor 2016, cited in Scherm 2024) The figure is only sourced second-hand, but the direction matches my experience. The 65 are worth the effort, and you do not win them with a presentation but with a result they have felt themselves.

In sales there is one more thing. Elsewhere an early win is evidence. Here it is also revenue. It creates exactly the room that the initiatives which do not pay off quickly will need.

And it delivers a first read on how this organisation reacts to change. Who joins in immediately, who waits, where the handover between inside and field sales really sticks. That replaces no planning, but it corrects the assumptions you would otherwise take into the big initiatives.

What I deliberately do not do first

Anything that costs time, training and moderation before it brings anything back. A new system belongs here, a new selling framework, a new process landscape, a new steering model. None of them is wrong, and a sales organisation needs most of them at some point.

They just do not come first. At the start they compete with day-to-day business, and they lose that contest. CRM is a good example. Everybody knows it matters, but nobody ranks it among the top priorities. (Zupancic 2023)

After a few small wins it looks different. The team has already experienced that change here brings something, and it carries the extra effort of the big initiatives more readily.

The fourth quarter stays clear

One rule always applies for me. In the fourth quarter, major changes rest.

In the software business it is the strongest revenue quarter. Schedule workshops or system changes there and you take money from the company and from the team the weeks their annual result depends on.

The quarter does not stay empty. It takes technical adjustments and measurement, a NPS for instance, things that do not hold sales back. The rebuild rests, the numbers keep running.

What remains

None of this argues against classical change management. What it says about communication, participation and leadership holds in sales too. Sales simply has one more condition. It has to deliver while it is being rebuilt.

So I start where a number shows a gap, where the move takes nothing away from anyone, and where the metric answers within weeks. Afterwards there is money for what does not pay off quickly, acceptance because the first change did not come at people’s expense, and an honest picture of how the organisation reacts to change.

Where the rebuild should then lead, the target picture the organisation actually carries, is the subject of the next part.