Categories: Sales Messaging | Sales Leadership
True alignment that drives predictable revenue means NO SHORTCUTS. No shortcuts on defining the problems your organization solves and how you solve them. No shortcuts on the steps you take to align behind your customer’s decision-making process. Very few buyers take shortcuts on the buying side, so great sales organizations can’t afford to take shortcuts on the sales side.
No Shortcuts Around Your Sales Message:
If every person in your organization has the same understanding around the value your company offers and the specific, one-of-a-kind way you deliver it, then your salespeople can be confident in their conversations about the positive business outcomes you drive. When everyone within your organization is laser-focused on delivering that message of value, you ensure a cycle of words and actions that allows customers to hear and experience consistency throughout the sales process.
Your messaging content is also important to give your sellers confidence, whether you’re helping sellers prepare for an introductory call, a discovery session or a face-to-face meeting with a new prospect team, a consistent messaging framework's supports the flow of a conversation. It guides how to listen, how to capture what's important to the customer, and how you express yourself in a way that matters to the customer. Alignment around a consistent messaging framework raises your sellers’ ability to conduct productive meetings and drive conversations that move customers to the next stage of the buying cycle.
No Shortcuts Around Insights That Drive Action:
In today’s buying cycle, sellers are going to be involved in multiple conversations with multiple decision makers. Those decision makers may be focused on different value drivers given their different roles within the organization. It’s important to pair consistent content with a consistent operating rhythm or sales cadence. Regardless of the role - seller, manager or sales executive – it’s important to define a single source of the truth that provides sales insight throughout the sales organization.
Sellers are out there selling, trying to close business. They need to know how their activities and contributions bring value to the mission of the company. Sales managers are expected to communicate with their team on what's going on with the mission of the company and make sure they’re reinforcing those actions within the sales organization. Sales managers also need to make sure the executive team knows what the sales team is doing and how their team is working within their territories or assigned accounts to impact the business and align with what the executive team is looking for.
Leaders in the organization need information and a line of sight to understand how the sales activities are aligned with the company’s overall goals and how they drive bottom-line revenue. However, getting that line of sight is probably what causes the biggest challenge for most companies.
No Shortcuts Around a Consistent Sales Cadence:
To truly drive long-term adoption and results that impact the bottom line, you’ll need a set of activities, guidelines, tools, and success measures that assist managers in focusing on the most important elements of the sales planning process.
Creating a predictable cadence around territory, account and opportunity planning will improve forecast accuracy and your reps’ ability to build a healthy pipeline. Here are key questions to consider when developing a cadence that drives sales planning activities:
- What are the critical few activities I should focus on?
- How frequently should I be doing those activities?
- What tools are available to help me?
- How will my success be measured?
We call the tool that drives that predictable cadence a Management Operating Rhythm® (MOR). It helps sales leaders focus on executable action with their sales teams. An MOR brings together all of your sales planning and execution processes in one tool. It makes it easy for sales managers to find what they need, when they need it. It also sets clear expectations of job responsibilities with senior management.
When everyone is using the same Management Operating Rhythm®, they’re all speaking the same language and everyone knows the benchmarks they need to create success. As a result, your front-line managers are less burdened and there’s consistency throughout the sales organization. Providing your front-line sales managers with a repeatable rhythm helps support consistency throughout your sales organization.
No Shortcuts Around Enabling Technologies:
The insights you have into key metrics can mean the difference between missing your revenue goals and breaking sales records. Long-term adoption and measurable results happen when a winning sales process methodology is integrated into the fabric of your sales operating rhythm. For most companies, having the right line of sight, and tools and technologies to support it, means a constant tradeoff between consumable and comprehensive.
Providing the right deal visibility means sales managers and reps can closely collaborate to win more deals and forecast more accurately. A great sales enablement platform application unites the entire sales team and provides actionable insights for better sales execution. It guides reps through the early stage elements that are critical to the sale, such as assessing the prospect’s current state, discovering the prospect’s biggest business challenges and defining the outcomes your prospect organization is trying to drive. In addition, the right opportunity to close platform provides later stage insights around the deal and helps accurately predict its’ likelihood to close. An integrated solution enables your sales teams to be audible-ready throughout the sales process and provides insights to help predictably close more business. It also improves seller and manager relationship, allowing managers to provide better coaching to reps by having better visibility into how deals are truly progressing and the overall health of the pipeline.
Learn best practices from the experts. Watch our on-demand webinar with Force Management's Managing Partner, Grant Wilson and Marc Silberstrom, VP of WW Sales at Clari.
