How to lever your Sales Strategy building blocks to increase your Commercial Performance?

“If it doesn’t live in the CRM, it did not happen or does not exist.”

How many times have you heard that as a sales rep or said that as a sales manager.

It’s all about crafting & communicating a Sales Strategy that exists outs of tangible building blocks that show your sales team what to focus on and how to do it to reach your company commercial results. Together with that your metrics and dashboards show ,how the perform and indicate where in the sales process further improvement & focus is needed.

This challenge starts with making sure all your sellers understand that as well. No data means no reporting means no process improvement because you cannot track what is leveraging or blocking your business. It’s simple. So, the sales team need to be able to see where they can benefit from all that administrative work and manual data entry into the CRM.

Let’s be honest it’s more perceived as burden than as an added value. Unless management steers the team based upon that data entry and reporting AND the management is able to learn from all these reports & pipeline management. This can be a product/market fit issue, not enough buyer alignment, not enough (skilled) people, not the right client or product focus, high performing marketing assets, Just In Time calling, quoting,… etc.

That’s where you make the difference in sales management. Is it easy? For sure not! It requires a buyer aligned sales strategy translated into a simple plan and even more important the focus and rigor to implement it in all your tools, which can be your CRM, internal meetings, dashboards, people assessments.

Where to start?

You need to understand that people can only manage people and resources, not concepts or numbers.

It starts with well understanding what your sales team can influence and manage for the full 100 % (their individual activities) and how this impacts your Sales Performance and final Commercial results. Clear building blocks* aligned with your sales strategy will show your sales team how to organize their activities (max. 5) & where to focus on in order to reach their commercial targets.

Level 1: Commercial Results:

Revenue Growth – Profit – Market share – Customer Satisfaction

Level 2: Sales Performance Metrics:

- Market Coverage: ensuring the sales effort and focus is on the desired customers & prospects

- Sales Capability: ensuring effective usage of sales skills & tools

- Customer Focus: ensuring growth & client retention

- Product & Value Focus: ensuring the right products are sold at the right margins

Level 3: Sales Activity Metrics:

- Sales Territory: Resource allocation to the right type of customers/prospects

- Customer Interactions: Interacting with clients and/or prospects

- Opportunity Management: Managing individual opportunities & win strategies

- Pipeline Management: Building & Maintaining a balanced pipeline

- Sales Enablement: Improving the sales team’s ability to execute

How to take it one step further?

In order to embed these building blocks into your sales culture, make sure you use them consistently in your sales team management by using these metrics in your daily, weekly & monthly team/sales coaching.

Show your team what you retrieve from your sales dashboard and their (manual) data entry and translate it into an actionable priority planning, if additional action is needed.

Take one or two the Sales Activity Metrics to Zoom into during weekly One-to-One meetings to make sure they have enough activity focusing on the right customer segments or product lines and making sure their effort having the desired results.

For example for a Business Development Manager:

Territory: # of calls done to the right segment

Customer Interactions: # meetings done

Opportunity Mgt: % of deals advancing to next stage

Pipeline Mgt: # of follow-up of quotes

Sales Enablement: Social Selling Index (SSI on LinkedIn)

This will make him accountable for what he can influence for the full 100%. If he’s not able to reach his goal for calls, maybe the prospect database or marketing qualified leads should increase.

If he hasn’t enough meetings, maybe a cold call training or outbound email campaign need to be organized. If not enough deals go to the won/lost stage stage, maybe he’s not following-up on his proposal.

If his SSI is below average, maybe a Social Selling training are useful or more/better Social Content need to be developed.

Discuss the Sales Performance metrics in your weekly Sales Team Meetings this brings the focus of your training / Steering Focus points to your Sales Performance. Don’t use that time for forecasting.

For example, for your team of account managers:

Market Coverage: % of Top Segment of client database called or visited

Sales Capability: Proposal-Win Rate or Average Sales Cycle Time

Customer Focus: Churn or Customer Retention Rate

Product & Value Focus: Average Deal Size

This way they know what to focus on to achieve their Revenue goals. If the team or individual is under performing, you can find out where support is needed. Ideally your Sales Team topics/trainings should be organized around the main drivers of these Performance Metrics.

During your monthly or quarterly Forecast meetings you should compare the forecast with the results from last period on Revenue, Profit, Satisfaction and Market share or other level 1 metrics. In case of under or overperformance, you should be able to leave this meeting by knowing what’s keeping you from obtaining these results or what are your main levers.

That’s how your sales strategy and its building blocks become embedded in your sales culture and steer your commercial performance.

Want to learn more or understand how you can implement this in your sales organization, contact me or have a look at www.Perpetos.com. We are there to support you in this challenge.

*Inspired by Cracking the sales management Code, by Neil Rackham