Four Areas of Sales Effectiveness to Assess When Optimizing for Growth

If you’re responsible for your sales organization’s success and need to make an immediate impact — we’ve outlined a roadmap you can use to scale success. 

Use your sales force as a way to accelerate your company's flywheel. Assess your sales organization’s ability to execute in these four areas of sales effectiveness. Prioritize your best opportunity to scale and maximize your sales organization's current success. 

Equip your sales team to accelerate revenue growth by improving their ability to execute in one or more of these areas:

1. Sales Messaging

In today’s murky business environment your salespeople need a message that will compel a prospective buyer to action. That message requires your sales reps to be relevant to your buyers’ evolving business problems. If they can’t, they won’t be able to progress and close opportunities at a high value.

There are numerous reasons your current sales messaging framework or sales tools and language may need a refresh. Here are four common factors that are causing other companies to invest in a sales messaging transformation that goes beyond minor tweaks. 

To drive scalable outcomes and improve your sales team’s ability to repeat high-value performances, assess how well your sales reps are able to articulate the business value of your solutions as it relates to what your buying community is dealing with right now. Assess your current messaging framework against the essential questions below. Does it contain clear answers to them?  

Building consistency around these answers is the first step to developing a sales message framework that enables your teams to sell at a premium consistently, regardless of external factors, strong incumbents, etc. Through our Command of the Message® engagements, we work to generate leadership agreement on the essential questions to ensure they build an entire sales organization of elite sellers, not pockets of top performers. 

2. Sales Process

If you’re responsible for equipping your sales organization to qualify better, increase deal velocity and stay focused on the highest value opportunities, developing a voracious qualification process is a great first step. It starts by ensuring you’ve got an effective sales process in place that defines who does what when and what critical activities are needed by managers, reps and other departments to move a deal forward. Without the right sales process, your qualification approach can quickly fall out of use or become a compliance exercise with no backbone to drive success. 

If you’re new to the organization or aren’t able to peel you and your sales team’s focus away from the forecast — now is the best time to assess for gaps in your sales and qualification process. Analyze your process given the context of your current state using these questions:

Building a custom and well-executed sales qualification approach and making sure every sales team member knows what high-value sales activities they need to execute is key to filling in the gaps in your sales process. Committing to building a consistent sales qualification process is your ticket to faster pipelines, more wins and nearly 100% forecast accuracy. 

When implemented successfully, MEDDICC (or its variants) provides consistency and efficiency around your qualification process. Customizing the qualification criteria to your organization and ideal buyer helps to ensure that the way you sell is aligned with the way your customers want to buy. Sales organizations with strong qualification tools, like MEDDICC, and a company culture that supports it, can drive revenue predictability, even in today's current economic environment. We’ve got resources you can use to determine if MEDDICC is the right solution for your sales organization.

We’re supporting customers right now in implementing virtual MEDDICC initiatives to drive immediate results. Contact us today to see how you can implement a MEDDICC sales initiative virtually and drive predictable revenue, quarter after quarter.

3. Sales Planning

Cracking into new opportunities and digging deeper into territories has become an ongoing battle for many B2B sales organizations. Regardless if quota attainment has been a consistent struggle or a new challenge, now is your best opportunity to get to the root of the problem before it causes more damage. 

Ensure your sales teams are spending time on the right high-value activities by assessing how well your sales reps are able to execute on account plans. Additionally, assess how well your managers are coaching them to success. Use these questions as a baseline:

These questions can help your sales organization develop a cadence around filling the pipeline through efficient territory, account and opportunity planning. Gaining cross-functional agreement on the answers to the questions above can help to identify gaps in your sales planning process and define where your managers and reps are struggling the most.

Once you’ve identified big gaps, consider how you can build and reinforce a planning process based on accountability that enables your organization to improve quota attainment and territory coverage.

Providing a predictable management operating rhythm (MOR) or cadence around territory and account planning can significantly improve forecast accuracy and pipeline health, in any economic environment. A MOR sets clear expectations of job responsibilities with senior and front-line management. When executed correctly, a MOR drives consistent sales planning and provides visibility both up and down the organization. See how we’ve helped other organizations scale growth by successfully implementing a consistent sales planning process and MOR.

4. Sales Talent

Hiring a high-growth sales team is critical to success, especially when competition for top sales talent is only increasing. Consider these scenarios, if you’re working with fewer people than you started the year with, each person's performance becomes that much more crucial. If you’ve been given the responsibility to hire top talent, their performance can either propel your organization forward or set it back in a costly way. 

Right now, you have the opportunity to make your talent a sustainable competitive advantage. Neglecting to own that responsibility can backfire for your sales organization and yourself.

Implementing ways to improve sales team bench strength and increase time-to-productivity can enable you to boost EOY sales and ensure the long-term stickiness and impact of your current initiative. Start to lay the groundwork for developing an entire team of top performers by assessing how well you or senior sales management can answer these essential questions:

As a sales leader, commit to defining and aligning on consistent answers to these questions with sales management and C-suite company leaders. Here are a few ways you can begin to develop your talent profiles and own your talent process.

Enable a Revenue-Driving Sales Engine. Build Your Roadmap. 

Whether you're defining how to scale the success of a current initiative or aligning on the right initiative to drive sales impact and increase EOY numbers — we can help. Achieve your desired outcomes faster by working with an experienced partner to develop and launch a strategic sales transformation. If you're weighing the right next steps, understand what the most elite CROs look for in a sales transformation partner.