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This event is designed to support the planning and decision making of business owners, CEOs, COOs, CMOs, General Managers, Controllers, and Sales VPs.
This workshop is for anyone looking to learn more about how to improve one or more component of sales success:
(1) TALENT: How to recruit and retain the right people for the right roles.
(2) SKILLS: How to use training and coaching to cultivate a winning sales culture.
(3) SYSTEMS: How to make process and technology work with your sales team, not against.
Solution
Pipeline Coach™ will work with you to make professional sales leadership a cultural imperative, and the sales pipeline a scalable component of your growth strategy.
We will help you build upon what you already do well; teaching you how to leverage all five components of a functional sales pipeline. Do the work yourself or engage us to help ...
- Improve sales performance and buy-cycle leadership.
- Deliver to important in-quarter and year-end revenue goals.
- Raise forecast sales performance beyond current expectations.
- Accelerate go-to-market, branding and product/service strategies.
- Optimize the ROI on CRM and other sales enablement technologies.
- Coach-up key people in all roles, from Chief Sales Officer to producer.
- Maximize shareholder wealth by capitalizing growth plans, raising
valuations and improving post-merger integrations.
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Make Growth a Personal and Cultural Imperative within Your Company:
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#5: LEADERSHIP
It is your capacity to change that defines your ability to grow. Your potential, therefore, depends upon how ready, willing and able you are to lead the change that is coming.
High-growth and ‘high-expectation’ business environments have the potential to deliver great reward as well as great stress to business owners, key executives, investors and employees. In such environments it is common for us to see leadership teams lose their appetite for change over time.
Rather than welcome change as an opportunity to continue capturing greater share of new and existing markets, leaders can allow success to foster a culture of complacency and even arrogance, ultimately forcing their business into a state of crisis; commonly expressed by the 'feast or famine' business cycle.
Leaders who use success to foster change, however, maximize their potential by creating a culture of curiosity, independence and self-reliance; turning achievement into a belief and winning into a habit.
Through our own education and experience we have learned how to partner with executives and producers to teach them how to use success to foster change, how to avoid the 'complacency trap', and how to get back on track toward welcoming change as an essential component of growth.
Together in this specialized partnership we will help you define and deliver your own unique path to success, including but not limited to your:
- Organizational Vision
- Cultural Imperative
- Brand Identity
- Leadership Map
- Performance Management Framework
We will work with you to identify where you, your team, and/or company may be out of balance - helping you address the areas you chose - giving you full control over the process and its results.
BY THE NUMBERS:
In its 2010 CEO Study, IBM found that organizations that have been 'trained to change' expect to capture 20% more of their future revenue from NEW revenue sources than their more complacent peers. Therefore, every new market these organizations go after will be seeing a new competitor for the first time. And, as the economic recovery continues to slow more markets than ever will be in play. Is your market in play? How much of your revenue in 2011 will come from new sources? How will you respond to new competitors try to eat your lunch?
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#4: STRATEGY
Optimizing your sales strategy is a function of three disciplines that when executed together expand your control over sales flow and forecast growth.
Years of working within high-growth environments has taught us that while sales is an essential discipline within your business it is only one part of the growth story. Enabling sales effectiveness ultimately is a function of how well sales (SLS) supports, and is supported by, marketing (MKG) and the product/service package (PSP).
Most often, clients who engage us at this level are successful but feel out of control. Being in control is possible, but only with the proper understanding and measurement of key metrics that leverage all three disciplines.
There is a formula we use to measure and manage sales flow
across these three disciplines. It is based on four key performance
indicators present in all sales pipelines. Using this formula we can define sales flow over any time period by multiplying the number of qualified opportunities (#) that enter the sales process by our average win rate (%) and average deal size ($). We then divide by the length of an average sales cycle (t).
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Sales flow is optimized when we can impact and measure the impact of all four metrics across all three functional roles and disciplines as described in the diagram:
- Sales and your sales model (SLS)
- Marketing and your go-to-market strategy (MKG)
- Product/Service Package and your customer experience (PSP)
The greater the impact … the greater your potential. If you're looking for a simple way to optimizing control over sales flow and your ability to generate predictable, repeatable growth, this framework may be an ideal place to start.
BY THE NUMBERS:
Our research indicates that when sales, marketing, and product/service teams are properly aligned top performing organizations produce twice the number of qualified leads, improve lead quality by 58%, shorten sales cycles by 24%, and spend 28% more time selling on average than laggards. What is your Sales Flow calculation? How big is the opportunity to improve your performance? How will you move the levers necessary to hit your goals?
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#3: TEAM
Every sales team has room for improvement. Every business leader needs to know where to invest for maximum impact and control over growth.
Business leaders who have spent years building high-growth organizations know the answer to accelerating sales performance lies in the strength of their team. And, successful teams depend upon the performance of key management (MGT), operations (OPS), and producer (PRO) roles to reach full potential.
Each of these roles in turn depends upon the balanced support of key systems, skills, and talent:
- Systems: Process & Technology
- Skills: Knowledge & Best Practices
- Talent: Right People & Right Roles
Great teams do not just happen. They do not evolve organically or develop naturally over time. Great teams are highly functional and take purposeful leadership to build. If you're looking for a simple way to organize and leverage future investments in your sales team, this framework may be an ideal place to start.
BY THE NUMBERS:
What kind of impact can a more holistic approach to team development have on performance? According to Aberdeen Group's 2010 Lead-to-Win Report, producers in the top 20% of firms studied achieve initial sales milestones 4x faster than producers in the bottom 30%. What would be the impact of your producers reaching sales milestones just 2x faster? What would be the impact of more producers simply meeting their basic performance expectations?
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#2: PROCESS
Dynamic Sales Processes create the highest performing teams and generate the highest performing clients. They provide continuous feedback, enabling team members to adjust as buy-cycles and buying centers change over time.
Other formal, informal, and random processes can create far greater challenges for a business than they fix, often underperforming by more than 20% on average (source: CSO Insights).
There are two essential factors that contribute most to the creation and maintenance of a Dynamic Sales Process.
- Factor One: Determine whether or not the individuals we are engaging represent a legitimate buying center.
- Factor Two: Determine whether or not the buying center is engaged in a legitimate buy-cycle.
These factors not only help to ensure that we are speaking to the right people at the right time, they also ensure that how we sell properly reflects how our customer's buy.
If the timing is right and a legitimate buy-cycle has commenced, a Dynamic Sales Process will position us as change agents who are most qualified to engage the buying center and deliver the value sought by its members.
Ultimately, the greater the number of buy-cycles that legitimately convert from one stage in the process to the next, the more effective the process (note: This does not mean 'conversion rates' have to be high). And, the less time it takes to move these buy-cycles from one stage to the next the more efficient our process.
Effective processes improve pipeline volume and efficient processes improve pipeline acceleration. Achieving both at the same time optimizes sales flow, expands the capacity of our pipeline, and creates an exponential growth curve.
BY THE NUMBERS:
According to research conducted by Aberdeen Group, producers in the top 20% of firms studied spent 18% more time per day using CRM, and achieved lead-to-win rates that were 4x higher than those in other organizations. Our conclusion is that there is a strong correlation between the time producers spend collecting data and the manager's ability to help producers make more money. Could your CRM system do more to help managers help producers make more money? How about giving business leaders greater pipeline visibility and forecast accuracy?
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#1: EXECUTION
Ensuring the immediate and long-term activation of the sales pipeline is possible only through a comprehensive commitment to train, coach, and manage your people to higher performance.
Practicing this comprehensive approach will give you the confidence to scale your organization with more predictable, repeatable results no matter how aggressive your goals may be.
- Manage to RESULTS: Manage team members and leaders leveraging the right data, decisions, and communication tools to ensure individual goal achievement and forecast results.
- Coach to ACCOUNTABILITY: Coach team members and leaders reinforcing the aptitudes, attitudes, and habits required to gain control over performance and results. Empower leaders
with the ability to cultivate their own coaching style. - Train to CONTROL: Train team members and leaders optimizing the combined systems, skills, and talent of the team. Collect and transfer best practices from across the organization to create unique learning strategies, dynamic training materials, and effective change management processes. IMPORTANT: Most training programs fail because they try to teach the wrong things to the right people, or the right things to the wrong people. By recognizing this upfront, we are able to help our clients find the right solution for every member of the team.
Making a commitment to this comprehensive approach will allow your managers to help you (1) create a culture that connects performance to organizational goals, (2) surface and address key performance gaps, (3) reward desired behaviors, and (4) facilitate meaningful change from the business plan to the field.
BY THE NUMBERS:
There are 17 million sales people in the United States today and most work with managers who are expected to deliver this comprehensive TRAIN>COACH>MANAGE approach. All too often, however, managers are not given the time, resources, or education required to succeed at this level. The result is an epidemic of sales teams managed to short-term transactional goals, without the support needed to also build sustainable growth. If you are looking for a proven approach for helping your team execute at a higher level, this framework may be an ideal place to start. (Source: US Census Data)
