Sales Transformation: No need to wait to be on a burning platform

The burning platform situation. Or how to avoid it?

On the night of 6 July 1988, the Piper Alpha platform in the North Sea became an inferno. In that chaos, superintendent engineer Andy Mochan had a decision that didn’t feel like a decision: stay and die, or jump into freezing water from a terrifying height and hope the sea didn’t finish the job. He jumped. He lived.

Business loves the “burning platform” metaphor because it flatters a comforting idea: when things get dire enough, people change. Leadership just needs to create urgency. Everyone will suddenly do the right thing.

Except that’s not how humans work.

Even when the house is on fire, some people freeze. Paralysis sets in. Others bargain with reality: “It will calm down.” “We just need one big deal.” “Let’s wait for Q2.” Some do not have the strength or will to jump. A few will keep moving stuck in their ways, with more effort, more hours, more stress, and less progress.

So let me start with a wish: I hope you’re not on a burning platform. Because the job of leadership isn’t to manufacture panic. It’s to avoid needing panic in the first place. It’s to build a sales system that performs without requiring fear as fuel.

That’s what sales transformation should mean.

I’m writing this article with two sources of inspiration. The first is Shiver and Perla’s 7 Steps to Sales Force Transformation, which I like because it treats transformation as an actual process (not a training calendar) and because it highlights how often organisations sabotage themselves with shortcuts.

The second is more mundane and maybe more useful: what we repeatedly see on the ground with our customers. We typically work with midcap organisations in the technology sector where a transformation office, ten project managers and a spare year to “roll out phase one” simply isn't an option. They need a pragmatic approach and start to see the first results fairly quickly.

I’m going to compress the spirit of Shiver and Perla's model into six steps. Not because seven is wrong, but because in the real world, our clients need a sequence that is simple enough to execute and strict enough to hold in the long term.

Step 1 - Identify the force that makes change non-optional

Sales transformation does not start with a playbook. It starts when the organisation is honest about what is pushing it to change.

Sometimes it’s an external force, like the market. Your buyers now show up with more information. Less FOMO - fear of missing out - if a competitor did something similar and more risk aversion. Access to various decision makers and the economic buyer is not an option anymore. Competitors have learned to sell outcomes, not features. And suddenly the behaviours that used to work - relationship selling, price based approach, demo-first enthusiasm, “we’re the best product” - stop producing the same results.

Sometimes it’s an internal force like an owner looking at getting his business ready to sell in 2 or 3 years and realising current sales motion won't suffice to get the multiple he or she aims for. Or it could be ownership, a leadership change or an equity event when someone new looks at the machine and asks uncomfortable questions. Why do we discount so quickly? Why are cycles so long? Why does pipeline expand the week before board meetings? Why can't we properly upsell ?

Or a leader who will see his exit of the business in 1, 2 or 3 years and eager to leave a legacy behind. A powerful drive as it's a personal rather than purely monetary drive.

Or it could be a combination of all these factors. And sometimes it’s a single sentence that tells the truth. A prospect once told me: “This business unit… it’s like the end of the Roman Empire.” What they meant wasn’t drama. It was slow erosion: the quiet decay of discipline, clarity, and confidence. Not a fire. A slow death.

Whatever the case, the first step is simply this: to make the force explicit enough that the organisation cannot keep treating change as a temporary initiative.

Step 2 - Create a vision that survives discomfort

Once the force is clear, a possible trap is to write a “vision” that is either fluffy (“be world-class”) or purely numeric (“grow 30%”). Numbers matter. But they don’t carry people through the discomfort that is to come before results set in.

A sales vision needs to motivate people in strongly. In organisation behaviour theory, there are three level of motivations that drive people. X, Y and Z. Motivation X is what money people work for. Useful but not critical to drive long term change. Motivation Y is who the people work with, internally and externally. More powerful as humans are social animal, more than "home economicus". Motivation Z is the most powerful. It's the why they do what they do.

If that vision isn't clearly defined by the leadership, the infamous why, then the leadership, middle management and sales people and supporting team won't support this change, months after months.

Without a big hairy goal that carry people through, chances are there won't be the expected transformation.

That vision needs to be defined at the company level. Yet, at the sales organisation level, a vision of how the selling will be transformed needs to be defined.

1. The type of sales culture and beliefs the organisation has. I’ve argued elsewhere that organisations often need to fix beliefs about sales before fixing sales playbooks. Because the invisible architecture - these beliefs - drives the visible behaviour

2. The market addressed, the ICPs and what is being delivered.

3. The selling motion. This centres on the type of selling (for instance transactional, packaged solution, consultative, complex) that needs to be deployed  

4. Business model. This includes answering multiple questions. For instance, how are customers captured and what channels are best. How is value captured? What's the pricing strategy and how do we capture value?

Step 3 - Diagnose reality before prescribing solutions

Most sales transformation initiatives fail for the same reason bad medicine fails: prescription without diagnosis.

Whoever has been battle tested in sales has seen it. A sales VP senses pain, buys into a framework (MEDDIC, Spin, Challenger, etc…) , a methodology to sustain it, runs training, changes CRM stages, updates the deck - and three to six months later the organisation is still stuck, except now everyone is tired and slightly cynical.

A real sales force analysis looks at people and system together.

It asks whether the team is truly set up to succeed in the selling motion the organisation claims it wants. It separates “willing and able” from “willing but not yet able,” and it has the courage to face the categories nobody likes to name: people who are "able but not willing" or those who are "neither willing nor able" for the role as it now exists.

It also inspects the systems around them. Is there a real process - or just stage names? Is there a methodology - how conversations are conducted - or is everyone improvising under pressure? That distinction matters more than most teams realise. A sales proces is structure; methodology is how you bring the structure to life .

It also looks at the systems around sales people. Is a sales dedicated recrutement in place? Or is hiring led by HR rather than sales. Is sales onboarding robust. Are sales management rythms there. What are the coaching competencies, the frequency etc…

If these don't exist, then the organisation revenue generation still runs on hope, charisma, and end-of-quarter pressure. There isn't a sales problem. There is a systemic problem - and a belief problem about what a “true sales” actually is.

Step 4 - Build the internal case: transformation is an internal sale

Shiver and Perla’s framing is useful here: you don’t “roll out” transformation; you sell it internally.

Not with hype. With clarity.

You need to show what “good” will look like operationally, not philosophically. And you need a coalition, because sales transformation dies fast when sales changes but marketing, product, finance, and HR continue to behave as if nothing happened.

Four areas amongst others need to be worked on and bought in by the organisation :

1. The messaging. Messaging matters more than leaders expect. We're not big fans of how “value proposition” is typically taught because it often drifts into a self-centred story: what we do, how we’re different, why we’re great. It’s logical. It’s also frequently irrelevant to the buyer’s lived reality. If you want my longer take on why classic value propositions miss the point, I wrote an article on the topic

2. The process (and the rules of the game). This is where good intentions go to die. If the vision is “consultative selling” is how the team should sell but the organisation has no shared definition of questioning strategy, monetisation of the problem, stage exits, no mutual commitments, no standards for qualification, and no discipline around next steps - to name a few of the requirements -, no consultative selling will ever happen. And when the “rules of the game” are unclear, every rep creates their own version under pressure. The result is predictable: inconsistent pipeline quality, chaotic forecasting, endless “send me more info” loops, and discounting as the default lever to create movement.

3. Sales management capability (the transformation engine). In most organisations, transformation succeeds or fails at the first-line manager level. Not because managers are magical, but because they make the weekly reality happen: what gets measured, what gets coached, how, what gets reinforced and what gets tolerated. If managers don’t have the rhythms (1:1s, deal reviews, pipeline reviews), the coaching muscle (skills, not just numbers), and the authority to hold standards, your transformation becomes theatre: a kick-off, a few decks, then drift back to old habits the moment the quarter tightens. There can’t be a case for success without managers properly equipped - and expected - to run the new operating model.

4. Sales team buy-in (they have to buy-in, for their reasons). Your reps are the ones who will carry the messaging into potentially hostile buying committees, execute the process when it’s uncomfortable, and live with sharper accountability. So buy-in can’t be “Please adopt this.” It has to be built on two things: belief and personal logic. Belief that the new way helps them win (not just helps leadership forecast). And personal logic: "why would I change my habits, risk my ego, and do harder conversations… now?" They have to have the will to do better. Otherwise, you'll be treading water…

Step 5 - Support: the systems that make transformation "stick”

There are many things we repeatedly see that either make the transformation real… or quietly sabotage it. A few spring to mind.

1) World-class sales hiring. During a transformation, not every existing individual contributor will be able to “make the cut.” That’s not a moral judgment; it’s a role reality. When the sales motion changes, the job changes. And in that new environment, bringing the right people becomes non-negotiable. The mistake organisations make is trying to “hire better” while keeping the same old selection logic: CV filters, experience proxies, charisma, and gut feel. If you want predictable outcomes, you need a predictable hiring process - personalised, structured, as bias-resistant as possible - and you need to identify fit early through sales talent analytics rather than late through painful performance management.

2) Playbooks and collateral. To support the chosen process, a playbooks needs to be developped to help the daily conversation. What language is being used, what phrases can be used for lowering resistance or building, say, a mutual agreed plan. Collateral matters for the same reason: it should support a value conversation and protect your team from slipping into free consulting, not give prospects more material to shop you around.

3) On-boarding. Sales needs a dedicated onboarding track. Full stop. Generic onboarding creates generic performance. Sales is the pressure point of the business: rejection, ambiguity, tough conversations about money, exposure to quarterly volatility. If you want consistency, you don’t just hand someone a product deck and a CRM login and hope for the best. You build a structured path that covers what they must know, what they must be able to do, and what they must believe to execute your sales motion. Onboarding is not “orientation.” It’s the first reinforcement system of your transformation - because it’s where you either install the new operating model… or quietly keep the old one alive.

4) Technology. Tooling is important - but only when it is in service of the selling motion you’re trying to create. From a CRM standpoint, if you’re deploying consultative selling, we recommend a platform that helps ensure your team sells the way you want them to sell: not just logging activity, but creating visibility into whether the right behaviours are happening (or not), and enabling robust coaching from that data. The wrong technology turns CRM into policing and admin. The right technology turns it into feedback, standards, and coaching leverage. Have a look at this whitepaper.

5) Training. Training without reinforcement is entertainment. The forgetting curve is brutal: people forget fast when there’s no structured revisit, practice, and application. That’s why training must be designed as a reinforcement engine - spaced repetition, micro-practice, manager-led coaching loops - not as an isolated event.

6) HR. What we see over and over - quietly preventing success - is a lack of awareness by HR teams of the unique nature of the selling function. It shows up in two very practical ways mentioned above: recruitment processes built by people who’ve never carried a quota. Or onboarding that’s generic, well-intentioned but operationally irrelevant to what salespeople face on day one. Sales transformation requires HR partnership - but it also requires HR to accept that sales is not “just another department.” And therefore requires tailor made processes built by sales experts.

Step 6 - Sustaining transformation: the part nobody budgets for

Here’s an ugly fact. Maintaining change is hard. Very hard. Starting is easy; sustaining the effort is what breaks most transformations.

We can pretend this is a “sales problem” if we want, but it’s a human problem. Even in health - where the stakes are literally life expectancy - people struggle to stick to new behaviours. The "Journal of the american medical association" quote a study of April 2013 that showed that 25% of adult men didn't make a single lifestyle change or according to Men's health magazine, 91% of people who started an exercise program gave up before embedding the habit for real.

Whilst 91% might seem high, the exact percentage matters less than the pattern:

The default trajectory of change is drift.

That’s why “transformation” can’t be treated like an implementation. It has to be treated like a culture of continuous development - a system that keeps pulling people back toward the new standard, long after the initial energy has faded.

In practice, sustaining transformation means repeatedly embedding the language and the behaviours of excellence until they become normal. Not “we did a training once,” but the steady repetition of what good looks like in your world: how you qualify, how you confirm next steps, how you discuss money, how you hold the line on value, how you forecast without wishful thinking. Language is not cosmetic here. Language is how standards become shareable - and coachable.

It also means deliberately growing a culture of coaching, because coaching is the mechanism that converts intention into habit. If managers don’t build real coaching skills, the organisation ends up with one of two bad outcomes: accountability without support (which creates fear and gaming), or support without accountability (which creates comfort and stagnation). Sustaining transformation means managers become capable - and expected - to coach the new operating model into place, week after week, not just report it.

Then there’s data. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards, but the right data that helps leaders see whether the transformation is actually being lived. Data that reveals ramp-up time. Data that shows what salespeople do and don’t do. Data that makes true sales win rates visible (not “win rates” inflated by fuzzy stage definitions).

Finally, sustaining transformation requires leadership that keeps communicating the strategic importance of the sales engine to the future of the organisation. Not in a “rah rah sales” way -salespeople don’t need flattery. But in a way that continuously clarifies priorities, reinforces the why, and signals that this isn’t the initiative of the month. Because, like children watch their parents, sales people watch what leaders repeat, what they tolerate, and what they invest in. Sustaining transformation is largely the art of making the “new way” feel inevitable.

A final thought: don’t wait for the fire

The point of the burning platform story isn’t that fear creates change.

If you’re on fire, you don’t need inspiration. You need sequence. You need decisions. You need an operating system that makes performance repeatable.

And if you’re not on fire - good. That’s the best moment to transform. Because you can choose change with a clear head, rather than having it forced on you by flames.

You don’t build a sales engine so people can jump when the platform burns like what Andy Mochan had to do…

You build it so they don’t have to.