Categories: Sales Transformation | Sales Leadership | Economic Change
Guiding a sales organization to growth through today's uncertain economy demands a higher level of efficiency. Changing customer needs and increased competition for budgets have the potential to expose gaps in the alignment of your go-to-market teams. Symptoms of misalignment show up as longer sales cycles, high rates of discounting, and the inability to close large deals due to buyer budget concerns. To get your sales teams firing on all cylinders and making aggressive progress on your growth goals, your most valuable tool right now is true organizational alignment.
Here are three critical areas where organizational alignment supports sales resilience and growth. If you’re interested in how sales leaders successfully capture alignment in these three areas, check out this video of our recent panel discussion with three industry leaders. Boomi CRO Marcy Campbell, Battery Ventures Partner Bill Binch and NWN Carousel CEO Jim Sullivan shared insights on how they're aligning their teams for success in the current market.
1. Alignment behind company growth goals
Too often, goals are set by leadership without full consideration or communication of how those initiatives look in the day-to-day sales activities. Make it your number one priority to understand the specific actions that are required from each role to progress toward key company outcomes, then define how you can invest in your salespeople to encourage those actions. What skills, resources and tools do they need to hit benchmarks and KPIs?
Even with a clear picture of your company’s growth strategy, it isn't always easy to equip your sales organization to execute against it. To align your sales team to hit company growth goals you’ll need to consider strategic initiatives aimed at changing seller mindsets. You’ll also need to equip your team with the tools and resources to execute on the front line. You’re not just leading a sales initiative, you’re leading a change initiative and your ability as a sales leader is going to directly impact your company’s level of success. Make a concerted effort to define the initiatives that will equip your sales team with what’s needed to scale the business. Hear more strategies firsthand from 3 experienced enterprise growth leaders in our upcoming Industry Leadership Panel discussion.
2. Alignment around a strategic transformation initiative
As you develop new strategies to address the changing economy and target new buyer problems, your sales motion will need to change rapidly to accommodate these efforts. That's no small task. Successful sales transformation takes a concerted effort to drive behavior change across your entire customer-facing organization. If you're not on the same page, you may not see the level of results you'd hoped for. It’s important to align early on and define the level of effort you’ll need from the sales organization and other teams to execute successfully.
If you’re launching a transformation initiative, you’ll need to ensure it becomes a company-wide priority, not just a sales-only initiative. Throughout the customer engagement lifecycle, your customers will engage with more than just your sales team. For this reason, sales-only initiatives often miss the mark. There’s simply too much focus on the internal sales operations and not enough on how other departments influence and interact with your buyers. As a result, new methodologies may not produce the organizational change necessary to drive critical outcomes.
Cross-functional alignment and support for your change initiative can make the difference between achieving sales transformation and delaying growth. It can be difficult to move a sales initiative forward if you don’t have this cross-functional engine behind it. Find out how you can capture this alignment with your leadership team.
3. Alignment with your buyer
Cross-functional alignment on your buyers' needs is critical to drive commitment in the uncertain economy. Companies have experienced unprecedented levels of change in the past few years; as a company, you need to realize that what drove value for your buyers in the past is probably different from what’s driving value for them now. Evolving with your customer is key to unlocking revenue growth. To do that, you’ll need to equip your sales organization to drive buyer-focused sales conversations that start by uncovering customer needs.
Internal alignment on your customers' needs starts with a mindset shift across your entire organization. Realign your sales organization by helping them focus on changing buyer value drivers. Capture executive agreement on your solution's business value and competitive differentiation. Equip sellers with the skills they need to chart the landscape of the customer organization and gain leverage with multiple buyer champions. We'll get perspectives from multiple growth-oriented business leaders on leadership actions that drive greater customer alignment in our upcoming live discussion.
How Elite Leaders Align to Accelerate Revenue
Navigating revenue growth in a changing economy is a complex task. When you're being asked to do more with less, it can be challenging to know where to focus or what leadership actions will have the greatest impact on outcomes for your sales organization. We invited three experienced growth leaders to share actionable strategies for powering through economic challenges in a recent live panel discussion. As a CEO, CRO, and Investor Partner, they each offer a unique perspective as to what accelerated the growth of the industry-leading companies on their resumes. They shared some valuable advice on how to align teams behind the revenue strategy and rise above the changing economic tide - watch the video on-demand here.
