My Purpose

The success of any commercial organisation ultimately rests on its ability to sell products and services profitably.

Sales is a vocation

Sales is a specialist vocation in the same way that the HR, Finance or Legal Professions are. It takes at least the 10,000 hours of practice or experience to become a professional in the same way that it takes top class sports people.

Truly effective Sales Leaders are far from commonplace and many organisations do not understand why their sales organisations are not performing as well as they should, except that revenue is “not enough” or “it’s declining”. An experienced eye can quickly understand where the issues are and advise and coach the team to become “best in class”.

An alternative approach

David Watts set up DWSL Ltd in May 2019 after a “Corporate” Sales career of almost 30 years, 22 of which were in Senior Sales Leadership positions.

I decided to become freelance for these principle reasons:

The quality of Senior Sales Leaders seemed to be declining rather than improving, with hires invariably not made on ability – “The Peter Principle”
The skills of individual sales people were markedly worse than when I and my peers were at the same stage of our careers. Not only was training in absentia, so was a basic skillset and ability to follow the basics of sales process.
Many investors and CEOs really don’t understand what a performant CRO/CSO looks like. Investment decisions can be costly because effective due diligence has not been undertaken on the investment target from the perspective of Sales and Marketing Capability.
Perhaps most importantly, I recognised that the “turnarounds” I had undertaken in Oracle, Siebel, Sage, Capgemini and EMC (sometimes in more than one business unit!) followed a structured approach that could be replicated with equal effect in other organisations, irrespective of their size.

Sales Transformation via a structured methodology

Diagnose

Diagnose the underlying causes preventing an organisation from being as successful as it should be from a Sales and Marketing perspective. Essentially comparing what exists with best in class.

Prescribe

Prescribe the cure to enable that organisation to close the gap between where it is today with best in class. In essence, listing the remedial activities to be undertaken to enable this to happen.

Transform

Transform the Sales and Marketing team via a range of prescribed activities to achieve significantly improved results. These activities will change the way the business operates commercially, and under the right leadership, will be sustainable.