The First 90 Days: The Playbook for Sales Leaders Inheriting a Team

If you’ve recently inherited a sales organization from another sales leader, you know how critical the first 90 days can be. You want to make a good impression, have an impact, and show your colleagues, team, and executives you’ve got what it takes to improve on the previous leader’s performance.

Given the pressure, a lot of new sales leaders and those inheriting someone else’s team feel like they have to make big changes and prove themselves before they’ve even had a chance to settle in. Unfortunately, the desire to rush usually backfires.

If you want to truly excel in your new role, here’s what to do instead:

1. Build Trust
   Experienced leaders know that the most important thing they can gain as a leader is trust. A team that trusts you will follow your lead. Executives who trust you will listen and give you more of what you need. Colleagues who trust you will help you. Job #1? Ask questions that help you get to the bottom of what matters to the stakeholders inside your company.
2. Assess the Team’s Way of Selling
   Every sales team has (or should have) a Way of Selling that defines the customer’s experience with them. It includes culture, strategy, process, methodology, marketing and sales coordination, management, training, technology, and professional development. Take the time to examine each of these pieces and catalog what you find.
3. Assess The Tech Stack
   The tech stack you inherited impacts every aspect of the sales organization. Salespeople interact with it daily, and it defines how they perform many parts of their job. Well-planned, easy-to-use, strategically designed tech stacks make the salesperson’s job easier, provide them with the support they need, and deliver the data, insights, and analysis that you as the leader need. Before you make big changes, find out what’s already working, what’s not, and what would make it work better.
4. Take the Quick Wins
   Assessing and understanding your team, your organization, and the tools you use builds trust in your leadership style, and few quick wins build trust in your capability. As you are taking stock, you’ll start to notice areas where you can relieve stress, make your team’s work easier, or improve their daily workflow. Take action on one or two that provide a quick win for your team, then do the same for other stakeholders across the organization where you can.
5. Evaluate the Tech Stack’s Foundation: the CRM
   While you’re executing on those quick wins, take a deeper dive into the foundation of your team’s tech stack, the CRM. The CRM affects every aspect of the sales organization, including your team’s daily workflow and performance. If it’s broken, holding your team back, producing unusable data, or simply not being used effectively, layering more tools on top won’t fix it. We wrote The Sales Leader’s Guide to the Right CRM to help with this process.

   1. Recognize The Signs That It’s Time For Change

      By taking the time to assess your tech stack before you make changes, you position yourself to make the changes that really matter. Here are the signs to look for:

      
      - Salespeople are maintaining their own spreadsheets alongside the CRM

      
      - Forecasts require a manager to massage the data for accuracy

      
      - New team members take more than 6 months to ramp up

      
      - Win/loss data doesn’t tell you why the deal was won or lost

      
      - Deals are dying late in the pipeline instead of disqualifying early

      
      - Sales cycle times are unpredictable and longer than industry standard

6. Build the Case For Change
   As you interact with stakeholders across your organization, you will gain a deeper understanding of what matters to each of them, the problems they’re facing, and what would make their life and their work better. Align the case for change with what each stakeholder values, and you’ll be more effective in executing what needs to happen.

Conclusion

Proving yourself as a successful sales leader in a new role isn’t complicated, but it does require a solid framework and skills. Many people think they need to rush in and make big changes to show they know what they are doing. But the real winners are the leaders who take the time to assess, learn, build trust, and address the problems that actually matter to stakeholders across the organization.