Categories: Front-line Managers | Company Alignment | Buyer Alignment
At the intersection of recent economic shifts, restructurings and rapid technology development, the sales reality is changing. The rules of engagement have shifted, and the way that customers discover, assess and ultimately choose your product may look very different from a few years ago.
As the sales landscape changes for your customers and your sales organization, remember it's changing for your team members too. Even for the highest-performing sales professionals, their tried and true practices may not see the same success. It's up to sales leaders to provide a path forward and support the individual success of team members with enablement efforts. Here are three ways to take control of your revenue team's outcomes for the upcoming year:
1. Ensure Alignment to the Buyer
Organizations must align cross-functionally with their buyers' current needs, which may mean a shift in your messaging.
Re-frame the value your offerings provide
A buyer focus is essential to selling in the modern digital environment. Your buyers have more options than ever before, and they have the ability to self-educate with the wealth of content available online. From the first interaction, every conversation should communicate the value and differentiation of your solutions in terms of their needs. From SDRs to Marketing to enterprise reps, ensure every customer-facing role is fully equipped to align their conversations to your buyers’ changing priorities.
Reframing your buyer message for what’s happening right now is crucial to making your buying community aware of your offering’s capabilities and value. With so much noise in the market, the ability to tailor the message of your solution's value to their required capabilities and desired outcomes will set you apart. Getting your entire team aligned around a value-focused messaging framework should be high on your list of priorities.
Is your team capable of articulating the value of your offerings in a way that allows them to gain buyer interest and sell at a premium? A revenue organization with value-selling capabilities will be far more prepared to thrive in the next era of customer relationships.
Nail down your customer’s shifted buying process
We know customer buying processes have shifted over the past few years, from a massive remote-work shift to the restructuring of budgets and approvals.
Have you considered how your customer’s buying process may have evolved? New business requirements, budgeting processes and responsibility restructuring may have affected how your buying community typically purchases your products and solutions. Therefore, re-establishing alignment between their shifted buying process and your sales process is necessary to ensure pipelines continue to expand.
2. Invest in Your Talent
Just as the past few years have been turbulent for your organization, they've also presented new challenges for your entire team on a personal and professional level. If your organization has been affected by economic downturn, this is even more true. As you prepare your organization for what's next, assess how you can build and reinforce your team for success.
Make talent a competitive edge:
Talent is your only sustainable competitive advantage. Recent events have proven even further the importance of having the right people in customer-facing roles. As you transition into a new era of growth, ensure you have effective talent criteria established:
- What does success look like in each role?
- Why have we hired the wrong people in the past?
- Why do we lose key talent to the competition?
- Why would someone want to work here?
- How do we hold people accountable for results?
Support managers:
Your front-line managers are the linchpin of your sales strategy, ensuring that your efforts make it from planning into execution. It's critical to ensure they feel supported and equipped to execute your strategy with an approach of coaching, rather than inspection. Take a look at our top resources to share with front-line managers.
3. Emphasize adoption and reinforcement
We can never predict what will come next, or how the sales environment will change. But we can focus on providing tools and support that are relevant and applicable to our teams. Rather than just giving directives or enforcing quotas, consider how your strategy fits into the revenue team's day-to-day operations. How can you provide examples of what great looks like in a way that is relevant to your team's needs, priorities, and strengths?
Any new sales initiative is more likely to get traction when positioned as a leadership priority and supported to succeed. We like to use the acronym PRIMR to help leaders devise a system for making an initiative stick:
Priority: Lead from the front and set the tone. Align initiative to goals and objectives.
Relevance: Make it practical and applicable to real-world situations. Spot-check relevance for each team.
Integration: Incorporate the initiative into other aspects of the business, like content and tools.
Measurement: Define the metrics that measure success and hold managers accountable.
Reinforcement: Ongoing; ensure managers are equipped to coach and carry the initiative forward with consistency and over time. Requires a clear and established cadence.
Don’t run the risk of letting a great strategy fall flat or lose steam. Your plan for guaranteeing adoption is just as important as the nuts and bolts within your initiative. Sustain new behaviors with a foolproof method for continued momentum throughout the year.
Stay Ahead of the Changing Market
Keep your team ready to execute against changing dynamics in the market by investing in three key activities.
Learn more in our sales evolution guide, Command What's Next.
