Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Kickoff
You’ve put in the work to achieve your new position and now you’re aiming to make an immediate impact on sales success. We’ve pulled together some of our most popular resources that apply to people in a new sales leadership role. As you build your execution plan, leverage these insights to avoid setbacks and implement a strategy that gets results.
1. Assess Your Current State
Your execution plan depends on the current state of your sales organization and your company’s critical objectives and goals. Maybe you’ve been brought in to build an enterprise sales team, support a new sales structure or fix flat-line growth. Regardless, it’s up to you to define what’s working and what isn’t. We've outlined six key areas to focus on and assess in your new role in this roadmap.
2. Build Consistency Around the Four Essential Questions
One of the most basic things you can do as a sales leader is to ensure your entire organization is aligned on the key value and differentiation of your solution. Generating this cross-functional alignment on what’s important to your buyer lays the foundation for success moving forward. Consider silos that may prevent true alignment on solution value and differentiation. The leaders in your company may think they’re aligned, but there may be significant gaps that will impede sales success. The most successful organizations don’t accept silos because this misalignment negatively impacts the buyers’ experience and sales ability to land and expand high-value opportunities. Don’t skip this important step. Now is your chance to build consistency around the business value your offerings provide to your buyers, so you can enable your organization to keep the focus on their buyers and increase revenue and retention rates.
Assess your sales organization for consistency around the answers to these four essential questions. Organizational consistency around these answers enables global sales organizations to be relevant to buyer needs, drive urgency and significantly increase average deal sizes.
3. Align Your Executive Team on the Sales Strategy
Whenever you launch something new there’s always the question of whether or not your sales strategy will stick and drive your desired outcomes. If you want a certainty of success, you have to have cross-functional buy-in and commitment for your sales execution plan.
Your initial sales strategy will have a positive impact on your organization (and your career) if you focus on making your initiatives top company-wide priorities.
Regardless of what you implement to achieve critical revenue goals, one reason why some sales strategies and initiatives fall flat, is because they're launched with a sales-only approach. On the surface, it makes sense, right? If you want to change behavior on your sales team, train the sales team. In our experience, these initiatives fall flat because there’s too much focus on the internal operation of the sales organization and not enough on the buyer. As a result, these initiatives neglect to account for buyer needs and how other departments influence and interact with your prospects and customers. This is why we always say it’s so critical for sales leaders to make their initiatives a company-wide priority. In this blog, we’ve compiled our top resources for building alignment around the sales strategy and around who does what, when it comes to sales execution.
4. Prioritize Your Best Opportunity to Scale Growth
You’ve got numbers to hit and specific goals you’re tasked with achieving (improve business predictability by x%, align sales behind a new merger/acquisition, etc.). While you know the end goal, it isn’t always easy to define exactly what your sales team needs to get there, let alone prioritize opportunities to improve sales performance.
Take five quick minutes to define and align what’s next for your sales team, using this rapid sales assessment tool. It will provide you with a customized report to help you determine specific action steps you can use to move forward.
5. Launch a Revenue-Drives Sales Initiative
If you need to implement new methodologies and/or change sales behaviors, you’re going to need to launch a strategic sales transformation initiative. Launching something new across your sales organization is no easy task. Leverage the best practices the most successful sales leaders use to launch an initiative that drives transformational change. Understand the resources and time commitments it takes from you as a sales leader and what to look for in a partner, if needed. Make the right choices as you move forward to ensure you roll out a strategic initiative that drives the critical business impacts you need. Define what good looks like in a sales partner.
Start With Your SKO
While you may now hold a sales leadership role that does not mean you can abdicate Sales Kickoff responsibility. As a sales leader, you own the responsibility of ensuring the SKO sets the sales organization on a measurable path to revenue growth. Define what actions you need to own, how to set objectives and how to use that time with your team to get them motivated and equipped to execute next year.
If you are considering using your SKO as a way to launch strategic changes across your sales organization, leverage these resources to ensure sales impact.
