Benchmarking the Effectiveness of your Sales Capability

The smallest of changes can have the biggest impact on your organisation’s sales effectiveness.

The cost of competing for business can be so great that it is vital you give yourself the best chance of winning.  Gaining insight into the effectiveness of your sales and marketing capability is a key step to improving your sales success.

As a full service marketing agency working with technology companies, we collaborate closely with our client’s sales and marketing functions.  With an outside eye looking in, we provide an external insight into our client’s sales and marketing effectiveness and share our observations and recommendations where we believe improvements can be made.

Whilst presenting our observations, internal stakeholders often have different views as to their organisation’s sales and marketing capability and this all too often puts the brakes on implementing a change programme.

A Get to Great ™ assessment eliminates these issues by giving the customer the tools to determine their own issues, gaps and resolution path against these proven benchmarking models.

By delivering the Get to Great™ benchmarking methodology, XLR8 Marketing uses best practice models to enable organisations of any size to assess the gaps and identify remedial actions in key areas of sales capability, quickly and effectively.

Assessments are delivered as a one day interactive workshop, led by our expert facilitators who are acknowledged subject matter experts in the technology sector.  The assessment drives actions to deliver a performance step-change in line with the agreed goals, typically improved sales revenue and margin, increased win ratio and reduced timescales and costs.

Desired outcomes are identified quickly and cost-effectively, under the guidance of the facilitator, providing a comprehensive report of detailed findings, conclusions and recommendations, including contributor and facilitator commentary, prioritised action plans and targets.

Progress and success are measured by repeating the assessment at agreed intervals, clearly demonstrating progress towards the operational goals set by the leadership team.

Only organisations that are truly sales ready will achieve optimal sales effectiveness.
So what does your organisation need to do to be sales ready…?

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Get me some sales leads – GET ME SOME LEADS NOW!!

Ever been so busy delivering client projects that you have taken the focus off pipeline development and before you know it next quarter’s forecast is looking really flaky?

By definition it is difficult to focus on several things at once.  In addition, lead generation is an activity which most sales people shy away from and will do ANYTHING rather than pick up the phone to someone they have never spoken to before!   In any case, tied to a phone playing the frogs and princes game, is unlikely to be the most cost effective way of keeping a highly paid sales team occupied!

That’s why many companies look to outsource their demand generation to an agency that will give it focus, bring some fresh ideas to prospecting and provide measures for the effectiveness of your marketing budget.

Many IT companies are currently driving towards their year-end – flat out to close deals for 2012.  But where does this leave 2013? The smart money is on companies who maintain dedicated lead generation activity to nurture leads, understand clients’ pain points and build deeper relationships with their target audience.   Whether this service is delivered in-house or outsourced to a marketing agency, now is the time to start building the pipeline for 2013.

Alternatively, you can always try relying on the pipeline fairy!

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Why IT Companies need to Bite the (not so silver) Bullet and set Marketing KPIs


Within the IT/Hi-Tech industry, marketing is too often seen as a cost or a fluffy expense that can be cut when times get tough. It is of course an investment opportunity proven to increase revenue (if done well!) and provide strategic direction for the business.

Investment in IT marketing may not impact ROI straight away due to the frustrating yet necessary lead times associated with influencing the market and gaining sales traction. For organisations with lengthy sales cycles this can be a particular challenge.

So how can a business assess the value from their investment in IT marketing and be confident that they are focusing on the right things?

Set marketing objectives with specific KPI measures that are aligned to your business goals and monitor their rate of change. You need to accurately measure marketing KPIs (ideally in real time using best in class tools) and fine tune your marketing strategy and blend of tactics to get the highest ROI possible.

Focus on setting marketing KPI measures with SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant/Realistic and Timely) targets that align with factors which are critical to achieving the business goal. Measure and monitor your performance metrics to determine what really drives your business.  The relevance criterion is particularly noteworthy as we seek to perfect the right mix of ingredients that have the greatest impact on business performance.

Furthermore, the relative importance of specific marketing KPIs will vary according to the type of IT organisation. Don’t look at marketing KPIs in isolation either. For example you could have the best marketing and zero sales if the product was developed without the customer in mind or if the business is heavily dependent on winning business through personal selling and its sales people are the weakest link!

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XLR8 Marketing Opens New Office in Loughborough

On 1 August 2012, XLR8 Marketing Ltd relocated to new offices at the Loughborough Innovation Centre, situated within Loughborough University’s Science and Enterprise Park, on the western boundary of the University campus.

The Innovation Centre is designed to meet the needs of innovative, high growth companies and it provides an ideal Midlands based location to better serve our IT / Hi-Tech clients.

We are delighted with the facilities and support services available to us as this will enable us to serve our clients more effectively.

Our Location

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