Newly Appointed Sales Leader?

Increasing Sales Effectiveness

How to Deliver Sales Success Before the Honeymoon Period is Over!

You are new to the role of sales director and possibly new to the organisation – a big gun with an impressive sales track record.  It may be that your organisation is looking to grow or diversify into a new market where you have expertise, or it may simply be that the previous guy has jumped (or was pushed).

Whatever the reason for your new job, there will be a lot of hope and expectation weighing on your shoulders. You are the White Knight, the Savior, The One who will lead the team, turn its performance around and set the company on the course to sales success!

But to deliver on that high expectation, you need to understand whether your organisation is geared up to enable sales or prevent them?

So what will you do first?

  • Sit down with each of your sales team to understand what they do, what’s in their pipeline, where they are against their targets, how reliable their sales judgment appears to be?
  • Understand what your organisation is good at/ bad at and learn what you should/ shouldn’t be promoting to customers?
  • Meet with the other department heads to see what they do and how well (or otherwise) they interface with your sales team?
  • Drive the length and breadth of the country to meet your happy (or unhappy) customers to see why they do (or don’t) like you?

All of the above?

Depending on the size of your organisation, this initial “familiarisation” could take a considerable length of time.  The same time that is ticking against your first quarter target clock…..

So how do you quickly balance the need to get under the skin of your organisation’s sales capability and learn enough about its idiosyncrasies to make you effective, before you lose the goodwill of your sponsors? 

It is a dilemma that needs to be faced quickly, since very few organisations will afford a new sales leader the luxury of 6 months, or even 3 months “settling in” period, to get a handle on what is going on and understand how they can make the required business impact.

Here’s a simple plan to sales effectiveness:

  1. Get all the stakeholders of the sales process together in one place and enable the meeting through an impartial facilitator
  2. Use a proven benchmarking model which has been tried and tested by your peers to deliver improved sales performance in other enterprise organisations
  3. Quickly identify the performance gaps and define a realistic action plan to fix them
  4. Measure performance again at the end of 90 days to demonstrate the performance improvement you have driven in your new role as sales leader

This approach has been deployed to great effect by many enterprise businesses that have applied Get To Great® Sales Performance Improvement to deliver a step change in finding, winning and retaining customers.  They have increased their ability to engage, qualify and close profitable sales as a direct result.

This proven and trusted framework for sales transformation is valuable to any business looking to tackle specific challenges such as lead generation, increasing its sales conversion rate, reducing cost of sale, or for continual improvement of its sales capability.  It is particularly relevant in organisations going through a major change such as new sales leadership and there are additional benefits in applying Get To Great® early in your tenancy of the sales leadership role:

  • you have no “baggage” or allegiance to the way things are done currently
  • you can bring your external knowledge to the debate
  • you will be able to demonstrate a measurable step change impact as a result of you joining the organisation

Download our Testimionials PDF to see what your industry peers have to say about Get To Great®

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How ‘Market Ready’ is Your Business?

In the first of a new series of blogs that considers the key aspects of achieving a sustainable revenue stream, from customer acquisition through to customer retention, we begin by asking the all important question – How ‘Market Ready’ is Your Business?

The failure of a number of established businesses illustrates the fact that existing strategies and management approaches can become ineffective in these challenging economic times.

Surviving and thriving in the current climate, therefore, requires a rethinking of your business approach – being fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your ‘market readiness’ in order to develop your strategy to suit and beat market conditions.

Computacenter looked at their market, adapted their business accordingly and are almost unrecognisable from 5 years ago, and doing very well. Find out more how Computacenter is delivering against its ‘Journey to Success’ strategy.

What is Market Readiness?

‘Market Readiness’ refers to having the products,  services, or experiences you offer to your target market, aligned to your target market , in order to delight your customers and increase profitability.

There are four fundamentals that your organisation must get right to achieve on-going success:

Get to Great Market Readiness

Market Alignment – Understand Your Market and Align Your Offering

Understanding your market, your customers and your competition is fundamental to sales success.  All three are constantly changing, especially in today’s economic climate.  When did your senior management team last spend a day reviewing your target market, its wants/needs, what it will pay and the ever-changing competitive threat?   If you didn’t review this fully last year, these key elements are almost certainly misaligned.

Only once your organisation fully understands these three critical market components can you accurately align what you sell and what you charge for it (aligned capability and pricing), maximising your chances of making a sale – and a profit.  Failure to do this can be fatal. Consider how many companies went under in the last few years and how prices have dropped for so many products and services; that’s market forces at work!

The need for market alignment seems logical and obvious; but still there are companies who don’t do it or do it badly – and suffer the consequences on a daily basis.  Why?  Perhaps they don’t recognise the problem, don’t know how to fix it or, worse, are burying their heads in the sand and hoping that things will right themselves automatically.  As the maxim goes, do what you always did and you will get what you always got.

How Can I Assess Our ‘Market Readiness’?

Using a tried and tested benchmarking methodology proven to deliver quick results – a Get to Great® winning and retaining customers workshop  is a facilitated one day activity that enables your organisation to more clearly assess your ‘Market Readiness’ for yourselves and identify quickly and objectively the key areas for improvement across the end to end process of finding, winning and retaining customers.  The one day workshop captures agreed actions that hone in on addressing the gaps and the overall assessment forms the basis for measuring ongoing performance improvement.

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