Categories: Sales Coaching Tools | Company Alignment | Sales Productivity | Scaling Sales
The journey from start-up to maturity involves multiple rounds of iteration. Achieving product-market fit and getting your customers to pay and stay are the results of how your product and message adapted to your buyers' needs along the way. Now, reaching that next benchmark means continuing to refine and shift the way your company thinks about and talks about itself in the market. In our work with rapidly growing B2B SaaS and tech organizations, we’ve identified three common components that are crucial for satisfying the growth imperative.
Here are three keys for leaders targeting the next revenue milestone:
1. Align Revenue Teams on Value and Differentiation
Igniting revenue growth anchors on solidifying a strong value message. That message is probably different today from the messaging sellers used when the company first started, and probably different from the original vision of the founder.
When working with B2B revenue teams, we often use the Four Essential Questions exercise with leadership to ensure they’re aligned on the key value and differentiation of their solution. The questions are:
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What problems do you solve for your customers?
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How specifically do you solve those problems?
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How do you do it better than the competition?
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Where have you done it before?
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When departments and teams agree on the answers, the foundation is set for building a messaging framework that articulates value and differentiation in ways that resonate with your most important buying audiences.
One of the reasons Command of the Message® has proven successful over time is for its ability to capture tribal knowledge from across the organization. In this video, three-time Force Management client Joe Marcin describes how building the Value Framework extracts core knowledge from across the organization at a crucial time and in a way that’s imperative for reaching the next benchmark:
2. Behind the Priorities and KPIs: Manager Coaching
Achieving the next level means having the right priorities for your revenue team initiatives and using the right KPIs to track them. If you are still in the early phases of defining your strategy, two resources are available to help: this infographic helps leaders identify priorities based on current challenges and desired outcomes, and our Rapid Sales Assessment tool will email you a customized report outlining the action steps necessary to accelerate revenue and drive growth. Give it a try; it only takes five minutes.
But what about when the KPIs aren’t trending in the right direction? The most powerful tool in a leader’s arsenal is your front-line managers; they have the most impact on driving skill development and reinforcing the desired selling behaviors. Your ability to course-correct is directly correlated to how equipped your managers are to coach up your teams.
In order to be effective coaches, managers must themselves be masters of the skills and concepts you want them to reinforce. Your strategy probably includes changing the ways teams do things like qualify deals or engage in sales conversions. Be proactive; invest in manager training early and ensure they are equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to coach teams up.
Great coaching builds seller skills, reinforces core methodologies, and drives consistency in how your sales strategy is executed at the seller level. Take advantage of our collection of manager coaching resources to enable your front-line manager team and drive home the heart of your strategy:
Coaching the Coaches: Manager Resource Library
3. Maintaining Alignment as the Team Grows
A key benefit of the Value Framework is its utility as an onboarding tool. New team members are able to be productive quickly when they have a guide for the value and differentiation messages that are top-of-mind for the most influential audiences. Here is how one unicorn leader described his bound copy of the Value Framework built with Force Management:
“This includes everything about our portfolio, tied to use cases, the value levers we hit for customers, our defensible differentiators, how we do it, how we do it better, all in one place and with proof points. I call it our sales bible.” -Craig Lewis, project44
Improved onboarding and shortened ramp times are noteworthy benefits leaders harness from building this revenue team navigational tool. But making it stick for the long term requires reinforcing the concepts and skills. It’s about dedication to practice and perfection – making new behaviors into habits.
In this video clip, Firstup CRO Joe Marcin explains why his organization’s bid to reach the next growth benchmark included a Continuous Learning piece on the Ascender sales acceleration and eLearning platform. Joe uses the metaphor of athletes who develops skill mastery only through the continual training that activates peak performance:
Now: Put the Growth Plan into Action
When leaders create cross-functional alignment across teams on the value they provide for their customers, the effects allow them to level-up revenue. For Firstup, aligning the growing team behind a powerful messaging framework led to increased average deal sizes, a 4x pipeline increase in large-scale, strategic deals, and closing several of the largest deals in company history. Read the Firstup Case Study and watch the full interview with CRO Joe Marcin here as he explains how the company is working towards its next revenue target.
We’d like to help your organization execute a customized plan that helps you achieve your next revenue target. Let’s have a conversation.
