Categories: Sales Leadership
I often have the conversation on “balancing long- and short-term sales goals” with sales leaders. Finding the time to fix execution gaps that you know exist, while in the flurry to hit your number is a common challenge. So the question becomes, “How do you handle the pressure of the quarter while ensuring achievement of the long-term goals for your sales organization?”
The best revenue leaders balance a focus on short-term goals while keeping their eye on the long game. In fact, it is the focus on the long game that will begin to make the short game easier to play successfully. This forward-thinking effort often involves implementing changes to the sales organization to drive resiliency and scalable growth. Here are a few suggestions to consider:
Three Ways to Improve Your Sales Team’s Ability to Compete
Knowing the problems your team needs to overcome in order to better compete for the rest of this year is the first challenge. Having a clear view of the horizon and an honest assessment of your strengths and gaps is critical. Thinking of it from these lenses might offer that clarity:
- Pipeline generation
- Account positioning
- Opportunity qualification
My experience says that any short-game issue (making this quarter, for example) is typically rooted in one or some combination of these three lenses. The challenge is finding and implementing relevant solutions, without wasting your salespeople’s time. That’s a tough ask when you’re already facing up against a hectic sales cycle or a light quarter, but elite sales leaders are willing to take on the challenge. I consider the challenge in three parts:
1. Consider the value you can provide for your sales team right now.
It’s hard to be steady as a sales leader when you’re carrying the number. I challenge you to ask yourself, "what value did you create for your sales team today?" Even if it’s a small portion of your day, consider the legacy you left behind. If you’ve been a leader for some time or plan on being in the game long, keep in mind, people will remember you for what you did for them or what you did to them. So, ask yourself, "How do I want to be remembered?" and then act accordingly, focused on creating value.
A great way to ensure you are consistently providing value is to implement a cadence around the three critical lenses mentioned above. I often point leaders toward developing a Management Operating Rhythm (MOR), to create a cadence around pipeline generation, account/opportunity reviews and other critical management activities that can have the greatest impact on the quality of the team’s pipeline and the individual opportunities people are working.
For sales leaders, this rhythm enables you with the opportunity to provide consistency, value and support to your managers and sales team. It helps to reduce the chaos and “screaming at the scoreboard” that tends to happen when you’re working to hit your number at the end of a quarter. From my experience, a big part of making a MOR successful is ensuring you and your fellow leaders are providing the how, not just the what, to salespeople on the front line. For example, not just giving your manager or salespeople a to-do list, but instead helping them think through and understand how to execute the most critical activities on that list. The additional value created here is that you are helping people build skills that might be focused on one opportunity but can be replicated across every engagement they have with their customers.
2. Assess for alignment or lack thereof.
If sales growth is on your mind how well have you aligned on what your sales team needs to succeed? Do those challenges align with company priorities?
Pushing long-term planning to the wayside might be the easier option right now. This push, however, will leave you in the same place next quarter that you are right now. Maybe you can afford that, but then again, maybe not.
As a sales leader, you have the opportunity to ensure sales is aligned behind company priorities and equipped to meet benchmarks. Can you say for certain your sales organization is aligned and equipped to meet your company’s long-term priorities (whether doubling revenue in the upcoming years, preparing for a successful exit, increasing margins, switching to consumption-based pricing, etc.)? Are you and your executive leaders aligned on the challenges hindering your sales team from meeting these goals? If not, there’s no better time than now to chip away at building out a plan to ensure sales success.
As a way to start a conversation around alignment, consider taking this rapid sales assessment. Sales leaders who’ve completed this assessment are leveraging the tool to capture cross-functional alignment on what’s needed for their sales organization to meet growth goals.
Get your answers and share them with company leaders to clearly outline misalignment amongst your executive team, without bias. Nearly every day, while discussing strategic initiatives with sales leaders, they share with us how this assessment tool has helped them:
- Identify where the executive team is well aligned and where improvements can be made.
- Determine next steps to ensure sales can meet company growth goals.
- Align strategic sales opportunities with company-wide priorities.
- Define the process of building and operationalizing a strategic sales initiative that sticks.
A clear benefit of this assessment is that you can garner some quick insights while still focusing on the current job at hand. All it takes is five minutes then you’ll get your customized report with action steps that you can use to begin an internal alignment conversation.
3. Take action.
Elite leaders are first movers because they understand that the long term and short term are not mutually exclusive. The greatest players of the long game understand that you've got to pivot in the short term to affect the long-term outcomes that you're trying to achieve. The cynic might hear this and say that you sound like you're talking out of both sides of your mouth, but the two ideas have to go hand and glove to have a long-game approach.
Take this example, ask any sales leader at any level who has achieved consistent performance (e.g. multiple quarters/years of achieving forecast/growth/quota achievement), and I’ll bet you this is someone who has an operating rhythm for the business that is focused, at a minimum, on both consistent pipeline generation and ongoing opportunity qualification. Those two things alone will ensure that by the time someone is putting together a forecast, the most critical opportunities in that forecast have been well qualified and, therefore, belong in the forecast, and there’s enough pipeline to backup that forecast in case something goes awry.
The sales leaders we’re working with right now are taking advantage of these concepts and points of view. They’re leveraging the current environment to implement new sales behaviors to drive immediate results and ensure long-term scalability. Plex is a great example that you just might get a few ideas from.
As a busy revenue leader, it’s hard to find the time to launch a strategic initiative, let alone develop it internally. Capturing the company-wide buy in and support necessary to power long-term success takes this challenge to another level. Alignment is the result of a concerted effort. It rarely happens organically, but when done right, it can power resilient sales organizations. Uncover what you can do to make it happen for your sales organization.
My colleagues; Force Management President, John Kaplan, and Chief Operating Officer, Dave Davies recently had a conversation on building resilient sales teams. They covered the current strategies leaders are implementing in the remote environment to improve sales performance and make new sales behaviors stick long term. You can watch the full on-demand webinar here.
Remember, your number one goal is to make the number, but your number one job is to help people get to a place that they would not have gotten to on their own and coach/teach skills that will create value for them in their market. Make that difference, and be remembered for what you did for your team.
