Recognize these symptoms?

Your Sales Reps

You lack transparency on how your Account Managers spend their time. You feel they spend too little time with their Customers. You want to help them structure their work, but worried to burden them with administrative tasks. This is the last thing you want to do because it’s already their key excuse for not spending time with Customers: internal overhead and administration.

Your Sales Plan

Your organization has aggressive sales objectives, and this is reflected in the targets you need to achieve with your Sales Plan. You have a hard time how to ‘distribute’ these targets to teams and individuals and an even harder time in tracking the actuals against these targets

Your Sales Process

Has organically grown, and each team or region has its own specifics in how they tend to do things. It complicates collaboration, and makes it hard to get a consolidated global perspective of ‘where we are in realizing our Sales plan’.

Your Sales Performance Management

Lacks a consistent Sales heartbeat: a cadence in which everyone in the Sales organization reviews the same information in the same format,  and results are rolled up to provide the Team and Management the required insights they need to take corrective actions when required.

Your Sales Tools

You have implemented a CRM, but your Sales Reps don’t recognize the ‘what’s in it for me’, and consequently adoption is lacking. You have tried implementing Reports and Dashboards that provide you with actionable insights but most of the insights still come from error-prone and hard to maintain Excel files that aggregate the required data from teams and systems

Your Customer

You lack a consistent view on the Customer across all the interactions that the Customer has with your organization.  And this is noticed by the Customer as well: the quality of the interactions is primarily determined by the individuals in your organization and not by a consistent process fueled with consistent data that captures the full Customer profile and history

Ingredients of a Solution

Define your Improvement Objectives: what is it you set out to achieve?

Decide on your objective and make it as specific as possible: Do you want to close more deals in less time? Cross-sell and Up-Sell to existing Customers? or, deals with new Customers? or, improve your Margins? Customer Retention? You can have it all, but not in one go, so choose your priorities and order wisely based on the value potential that each of these potential improvements represent

Define the Sales Process & Organization you need to achieve your objectives

You can not optimize what is not organized. Your Sales Process will get you organized. One way of working for everyone in Sales. One way of Managing Accounts. One way of conducting Customer visits. One way of spotting and closing new deals. So define your Sales Process, and articulate which role will have which responsibilities in the process: who will do what? And consquently: map the roles to your Sales Organization: who will take on which role?

By leveraging existing standards like Lean Six Sigma you can optimize your processes to simplify them and eliminate any overhead. Whilst in parallel ensuring that your improvements become measurable as well to ensure that you can manage the realization of the anticipated value

Build the Sales Tools that will support the process

Technology offers great potential to accelerate the Digital Transformation of Sales. And with your Sales Process defined, you can now design how technology and tools can optimally support your Sales Process. In essence: Sales Reps should be focussed on Customers and Sales, not on administrative tasks. The “What’s in it for Me” should be obvious to the Sales Rep, creating a pull on the adoption because it will accelerate them and their results.

A critical step in setting up the Sales Tools is ensuring that your Sales (Master) Data is of sufficient quality, this is a pre-require for any automation: organize before you automate!

Setup the required Performance Management Cadence

A Performance Management Cadence needs two things 1) clear targets and 2) regular reviews

Clear Targets: Ensure the Targets from your Sales Plan are cascaded to the individual Sales Rep:” everyone will carry their personal accountability for performance on achieving their target

Regular Reviews:  Clearly define Who will review What with Whom When? Everyone should review the same Performance Indicators with the same information in the same format. And, proper corrective actions need to be taken when required.  Results and communication on corrective actions are rolled up to a global level, providing Senior Management with  global insights into the performance of actuals against the plan.

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