STEPS – journey to excellence
- Achieve time and cost savings
- Operating challenges feel scary … Take concentrated steps to ratchet up productivity
1. Cut the three most wasteful non-customer-facing tasks and redirect these to a sales support function. If a formal shared services center does not exist, create one for each core region, and plan to shift 50 percent or more of sales support activities to these groups within a year.
2. Overhaul and automate sales tasks, starting with the most critical mission: Develop a road map to automate 20 percent of core sales processes over the next 12 months. Add teeth to these plans and hold leaders accountable for delivering specific ROI gains from this work.
3. Embrace a remote-first model for the long-tail: Commit to moving 25 percent of low-growth customers—those likely to contribute less than 10 percent in annual revenues—to inside and digital sales channels within a year.
4. Introduce rigid performance management: Establish a weekly steering cadence to align sales team activities with high-value opportunities and ruthlessly de-prioritize lower-value engagement.
5. Establish a systematic approach to sales capability building: Use sales and pipeline analysis to surface the knowledge and capabilities that teams will need to master over the next 12 to 18 months. Channel learning and coaching toward those areas and pull back on non-essential training.
6. Designate a small team to drive productivity improvements: Give them technology funding, run sprints every three months, and track productivity KPIs on a monthly basis.
Peter Drucker once said, “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else.”
Sales leaders that make this their guiding principle can make 2024 a year of transformational gains.
Ideas
- Sales collateral: metrics: opportunity characteristics and usage
- Dynamic pricing analytics with automated approval workflows and incentives
- Click to share quotes from CRM; automated contracts from approved quotes
- 360-degree account view (including performance interactions, full potential, etc.) and digital account plans