What should you be doing today to make your number tomorrow? Use this theme as a reference to help you think through an action plan on how you (and your revenue growth team) are going to make your number this quarter and beyond in 2021.
As a fellow sales and revenue growth leader, many of us are living our sales lives a quarter at a time. The tyranny of the urgent plagues all sales leaders. But as a sales leader in today’s environment, we must be thinking beyond this quarter and next.
As the head of sales, our ability to influence in quarter deals is limited; beyond just playing super rep and closing the deal ourself. Which doesn’t scale and is not the purpose of our role. We should be thinking about segmentation, capacity, pipeline generation, marketing activities and a multitude of other factors. These will influence our business in the quarters to come. Couple that will balancing our time and energy on coaching our team to make this quarter happen.
No one said it would be easy, but it’s the burden we carry as the sales leader. The question is, what should we be doing today to make our number tomorrow? Use the rest of this blog to help you think through an action plan on how you are going to make your number this quarter and beyond.
Marketing Alignment: Depending on our revenue life cycle, marketing’s influence on top-line takes multiple quarters to manifest. Knowing that, we and our CMO should be tied at the hip and developing targeted marketing tactics to create pipeline 2+ quarters out.
As I’m sitting in the same chair, I am looking at our out-quarter pipeline and identifying areas of softness for the marketing team to focus on. This will help us call the right plays relative to need. Is it a demand gen play? Is it an ABM play? Let the future pipeline inform the plays we run with marketing. When sales and marketing organizations are aligned, the chances of us making our number increase exponentially.
Segmentation: When our sales team is in the field (in 2021 remotely at their home office), where are they spending their time? Are they calling on the right accounts? The ones with the most potential or highest propensity to buy? Unfortunately, the chances are that the answer is “no”. What do we do about it? We conduct an Account Segmentation exercise where we rank our account (customer and prospect) based on propensity to buy. We then use this data to allocate and prioritize our sales team’s time and energy. Segmentation also helps us think about capacity needed relative to the opportunity.
Pipeline Inspection: Forecast calls are a sacred ritual that happens almost weekly for sales leaders. These are a necessity for us to be able to call our number. The problem with them is they tend to be short sided, meaning they primarily focus on current quarter deals.
In addition to current quarter activity, we as sales leaders, can’t lose sight of out quarter activity. For the sake of simplicity, lets call all deals outside of the current quarter ‘pipeline’. So what are we doing to inspect our pipeline activity? How are we measuring pipeline growth? Are more deals coming into the pipeline? Are the deals progressing? What is the source of the new pipeline deals? What is the average deal size?
All of these questions seem somewhat basic, but all have a significant impact on our 2+ quarters from now, so we tend to lose focus. Point being, we as a sales leader should be spending just as much time and energy inspecting our pipeline as we do our current quarter forecast.
The above are a few plays of many us can run. But these are foundational when thinking about tactical activities we can do today to help us make our number tomorrow.
If you think that any of the above may be a potential opportunity for you in your business, I suggest you complete the our rapid diagnostic and contact me via mslonaker@mattallendevelopment.com. This will help you think through how you prioritize your time and efforts as we progress through 2021.
Attaching several of our recent briefs and tools to additionally help you think your strategies and tactics:
Visit us online to discover our additional insights and details on how we can help your team via www.mattallendevelopment.com.
Happy selling! Grow!
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