Start the Year Strong: What Top B2B Revenue Leaders Are Doing Now

The start of the year is an opportunity to capitalize on the mindset of a fresh start. Your revenue teams are setting their goals and habits for the new year, and SKOs and strategy sessions are shifting their approach. The first month or two will be crucial in setting the foundation that will determine your organization’s success this year.

Now is the time to lay out a bold strategy and empower your teams to take control of closing bigger deals, stacking pipeline, and driving toward organizational goals. Here are three strategies that leaders are using to start the year strong with a message that delivers ROI and aligns with your broader vision for growth and profitability.

1. Ensure Buyer Alignment in Critical Sales and Customer Stages

In today's quickly evolving market environment, your buyer’s challenges may also be changing. Some of your sales team may be uncovering and attuning to these changes, but a few A players can't drive your growth and valuation strategy. You need your revenue team to consistently maximize the value of their pipeline and secure high-value deals.

Buyer alignment doesn't just apply to the sales team. Leaders at the most successful organization's we've worked with ensure the entire GTM function can consistently execute value-based conversations, with a buyer-focused mindset from the top down. Start to shift the narrative by asking these questions:

• How have your buyers' needs changed? 
• Can you solve these new problems? How do you solve these new problems?
• What differentiators make you better equipped than the competition to address your buyer’s new challenges?
• How are your salespeople equipped to articulate your value and differentiation as it relates to these new challenges?

Consider how executive misalignment is impacting your buyer message. If you asked your leaders these four questions, how many different answers would you get?

Generating alignment on these questions in the executive team is the first step to tightening up execution. Without a unified message and process for communicating value relevant to your buyer's biggest priorities, your team will likely suffer from:

• Too much discounting

• Long sales cycles

• Too many deals lost to no decision or “not right now” decisions

Those challenges will impact your ability to build on recurring revenue. Once getting customer-focused is established as a priority, give managers the tools to to coach on a common language for addressing new buyer needs to ensure your business value and differentiation are communicated in every opportunity. Consistency in execution is key to building the momentum you need to reach growth goals this year.

2. Make Your Teams Voracious Qualifiers

Sales qualification is key to efficiently closing revenue in your organization, meaning more predictable timelines and forecasts. The organizations that enable their teams to be voracious qualifiers will enable a higher level of visibility into the business, demonstrating greater value to stakeholders. Put your team in this league by introducing a rigorous qualification framework early on in the year.

Sales qualification is too often viewed as a side dish to the forecast - a “nice to have.” The truth is, qualification is a vital ingredient in nailing your forecast. Below are some common reasons sales organizations struggle with qualification. If any of these traits are applicable to your organization, improving your qualification process is a great way to drive revenue momentum this year.

Too Focused on the Short-term

When working in a scarce economy, it’s easy for sales leaders and teams to become zoned in on the current quarter and forecast. They’re treading water just trying to make the number, having qualification conversations much too late in the quarter or in the buying process. They stop building future pipeline. When your current deals are tied to the current forecast, you lose leverage and start focusing on just closing the deal at any cost. It becomes a never-ending cycle.

No Consistency

Everyone on your team should be on the same page about what makes a great deal and the key indicators of each deal stage. When account leaders are saying one thing, the sales team is saying another and leadership has a third language — no one is truly clear on the language they need to be using. Can you truly trust the validity of every deal? Consider how much strain this miscommunication and alignment puts on the forecast and your ability to accurately predict revenue.

Managers Not Equipped to Coach

To start the year with a solid foundation, it’s essential to effectively equip managers to coach reps on their deals. It’s easy to assume because managers are pros at selling, they understand how to guide others, but effective teaching is a skill in and of itself. Without the right direction from the organization and consistency in the sales process, managers are either too relaxed about qualification or hold strictly to benchmarks without helping sellers build the roadmap to get there. Don’t minimize the importance of teaching managers how to coach and not just enforce.

Why Voracious Qualification is Essential to Success

It’s easy to let the ball drop on qualification because it’s one of those sales fundamentals that we may lose sight of when we’re looking at a big opportunity or a large new logo. As passionate sales professionals, we’re easily influenced by the energy of the opportunity. Yet, it is almost impossible to consistently hit numbers and pursue growth without an objective qualification process.

3. Make Sales Negotiations a Process, Not an Event

You can't know what the year will bring, but you can prepare your team to preserve margin by creating an intentional negotiation strategy. Enhance predictability by removing the surprises of last-minute discounting or deals tied up in negotiations. The start of the year is a great time to get clear, unilateral agreement on what determines a great deal for your company. Implement a common framework for negotiation across your entire organization to:

1. Provide customer-facing teams guidance on the specific priorities they are looking to address in negotiated customer agreements

2. Help salespeople determine the negotiation strategy needed to manage various stakeholders and reach an agreement consistent with those priorities

3. Ensure negotiated agreements and prices reflect not just your product, but relevant positive business outcomes for the customer based on their current concerns

Your salespeople are likely working with an increase of interested parties on the buyer side, experienced buyers who are laser-focused on cutting costs and driving revenue. They will identify and exploit the lack of alignment across your selling organization to gain leverage. Remember that negotiation is an organizational competency, not just a sales skill. Share these top negotiation resources with your front-line GTM managers to improve their team's ability to negotiate and sell on value to improve margins consistently.

Lean Into Opportunity

As you establish a bold revenue strategy for the year ahead, consider investing in your sales teams and improving their ability to execute. We're working with teams right now who are increasing pipeline and closed-won deals by figuring out the best opportunity to drive revenue and leaning into it to start the year strong.

Now is the best time to make a change.

Changing customer problems can represent an opportunity for your organization to move in on untapped market needs, secure new logos and surpass the competition. Embrace this opportunity by equipping your team with the right tools. Determine where you can have immediate impact on your goals for the year and create the foundation to repeat that success.

Start building the message that will increase your value and customer loyalty this year.