“The best kind of marketing tells the truth, it’s concise and engaging.”
Ideas
- Misc.: competitors, peers, gross margins, FTE (full time equivalent)
- Productivity – driving higher productivity.
- Seek efficient growth
- Profitable growth – transformative—and disruptive
- Capability gap – leaders & laggards …
- Sales organization – be more calibrated in how they work – squeezing out value
- What do top tier companies do differently – capabilities prioritizing
Three areas:
- Free up seller time for customer-facing activities.
- Prioritize the most valuable opportunities.
- Do a better job developing high-performing talent.
Radically offload and automate non-sales activities
Non-selling activities = 2/3 of average sales team’s time
- 33% = customer-facing time
- 66% = non-customer facing
- Lead qualification
- Opportunity management
- Configuration, pricing, and quoting (CPQ)
- Order management
- Post sales activities
Ideas
- Sales team capacity | smart workflows
- Analyze customer data – identify leads, score leads re: value potential
- Outreach – specific journey stage(s) & negotiate guidance
- Focus on seller experience
- Toggling between systems [stop this]
- Ensure actual and deal-level insights are presented in a user-friendly way
- Seller adoption: increase productivity, conversion, and sales
- Start with simple steps and get them refined rapidly
- Decrease order entry times
- Lift in sales | lead enrichment
- Shared service centers [50%of non-selling tasks]
- Automation | AI capabilities [generative AI]
Ruthlessly focus on the most valuable opportunities [size of opportunity!]
- Decrease time with/on customers that contribute 20% or less to company’s revenues
- Intensive sales engagement for high-value accounts – lowering “cost to serve”
- Prioritize accounts by spend and growth potential
- Third-party data to refiner segmentation and define next-best-action opportunities
- Build a data-mart – use variables with predictive power
- Identify growers with a high propensity to spend
- Sales steering tool: focus data on highest-value opportunities vs. time spent
- Sales meetings: which customers to contact with what offer and messaging
- Support teams: pitch decks and materials -> to get up and running quickly
- Account coverage
- Calendar, email, activity data (other)
- Tech stacks | analytics | prescriptive insights
- Have a clear expectation for where future growth will come from – and where not – helps leaders de-prioritize their long-tail opportunities and find ways to serve these slower-growth accounts more efficiently.
- Often smaller companies, with less complex needs, met through self-serve digital channels or through remote engagement with inside sales team, or engaging with distributors
- Service levels – eg, shipping options, MOQs, – adjust to different account types
Cultivate and motivate high-performance talent
- Sellers are the productive engine of any sales organization
- Top performers – fine tuning skills development, sales steering
- Tying incentives to specific seller targets
- Specific skills with high-performance in each channel and role
Learning journeys
- Channel specific learning journeys
- Skills to drive customer performance/productivity
- Certification program
- Financial and non-financial rewards
Ideas
- Performance steering – KPIs vs. create business specific guidance to focus and direct seller activities
- Customer insights
- Price recommendation engines
- Predict and prevent customer churn
- Incentive schemes: From quota-driven models to align incentives dynamically in response to strategic priorities
- Prediction model: customers most at-risk for churn
- 20% of bonus payout success linked to lowering account churn risk – cut customer attrition
- Daily or weekly huddles to stimulate customer conversations – problem solve customer issues collaboratively, discuss best ways to support specific sales actions