Author Archives: Thomas Barrieau

The Rear View Mirror Trap

Posted on by
1

Guest post by John Rounseville

We’ve all been there.

It’s Friday afternoon after a busy week, or worse, Monday morning after a busy weekend. Your task is to compile a sales report for your manager. You check your notes from the week, look in your “Sent Items” folder, review your schedule from last week, and try to piece together what is happening in your sales territory.  After an hour or two of work, you send out the details: mostly talking about business you closed (put that at the top!), your production numbers versus your budget from last week, where you went and what you talked about. Sometimes, you have to talk about the dreaded lost business (put that at the bottom).

This represents one of the traps sales organizations fall into: only looking at the past week, month, or quarter and managing to that information. With today’s reporting technology, it’s easy to report our numbers; how many sales calls, which gold level clients we visited, etc.  The information is available on our dashboards or on a formatted spreadsheet before we have our first sip of coffee on Monday morning.

It is equally easy for management to fall into this trap. As long as information is flowing to you, there is less of a need harangue your charges for information and you can focus on other management details. The problem is compounded in sales meetings, which follow the same script. Often the sales person will simply recite their “rear view” information, wasting valuable meeting time.  Management not only gives the practice a tacit approval, they often follow suit and report in the same way to their superiors.

This reporting style is akin to driving your car while looking solely in the rear view mirror; you are destined to crash. The organizational perspective must be shifted from looking at past production towards a more forward-looking view. Specifically, what opportunities will I close this week/month/quarter? What help do I need from the pricing, management, or operational teams in order to close what’s in my pipeline? Who do I need to visit, call, or correspond with to close these opportunities? What business do I have that is on the precipice of being lost and what steps should be taken to prevent that? These are the questions that should be the focus of successful sales teams and answered when reporting on or meeting about sales opportunities.

Granted, there are instances where a backward glance is important — catching downward trends, reporting service failures, discussing growing or slowing receivables — but a good sales person will generally see these issues coming if their eyes are out front.  As a manager, I would much rather be aware of business that I am about to lose and understand what needs to be done to prevent that, than hear about business that I have lost and now need to regain.

With this in mind, here are some tips for managing with a forward-looking perspective;

  1. Design your meetings with an eye to the future - As a manager, you are in charge of what the minutes of your sales meeting will look like. Draw up an agenda with specific Terms of Reference (TOR Document) and keep it somewhere (the company Intranet, sales home page, etc.) where everyone has access to it. Keep it solely focused on upcoming opportunities, contracts, important meetings or anything else that is in the future. Most importantly, stick to it. Once the meeting agenda is run through on a weekly basis a few times, it will feel more comfortable. At the end of the meeting, leave 5 minutes or so for the glance in the rear view.
  2. Design reports that are forward-looking - Similar to meeting design, you should dictate what you want your sales people to submit to you. If you use a CRM tool, there are many applications that will pull data into a specific report design. Keep the headings to “Closing Opportunities,” “Help Needed With,” or “Upcoming Contracts.” This will help your sales people to manage their customers in the present and future.
  3. Keep a list of major opportunities – Keep a list of all major opportunities in your pipeline with notes on where they are. Again, if a CRM tool is used, have your dashboard set up with all of your team’s opportunities and move through the highlighted ones as a group. Remove opportunities that are won or lost to keep the pipeline fresh.
  4. Measure the future – Make your key performance indicators (KPIs) future-based; opportunities per salesperson, percentage of Stuck opportunities (haven’t changed status in x days), percentage of opportunities past due (meaning the close date is in the past), and overall opportunity age are usually good indicators of how well your team is managing your pipeline.

John Rounseville is an independent sales consultant and a 15 year veteran of sales and sales management within the logistics industry. Most recently, John was the Director of Sales and Marketing Process Improvement with Horizon Lines, LLC. John has a BA from Georgetown University and received his MBA from the Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Are You Part of the Sales Planning Process? If Not, You Should Be.

Posted on by
Reply

Much of the work we’ve done as sales productivity consultants assisting clients with their sales plans has been done primarily with sales management.  While this may have been appropriate in the past, the rise of sales operations as a critical driver of sales productivity means that we now strongly encourage clients to include sales operations in the planning process.

Referring to a previous post on how to build a successful sales plan, many of the elements that we recommend incorporating into a sales plan would clearly benefit by including input from sales operations.  Obvious examples include “Pipeline Management and Forecasting,” “Compensation Strategy,” and “Sales Automation and Technology Support.”  Other elements, however, may not be as obvious.

Here are five sales plan elements that sales operations is not commonly involved in, but should be:

  • Top Tier Prospect Definition.  Clearly defining the characteristics of a top tier prospect allows sales to better understand which opportunities they should be giving their time to.  As the company’s CRM expert, you can provide sales leaders with hard customer data that will make the preparation of buyer personas easier and more precise.  Information on customer demographics, firmographics (information about companies), and market verticals can all be used to better define target prospects that will bear the most fruit.
  • Buy Cycle and Sales Cycle.  A major source of forecast inaccuracy is ambiguous sales-stage definitions in the CRM system.  An undeveloped opportunity assigned to a more advanced sales-stage will inflate the forecast while a well-developed opportunity assigned to an early stage will deflate it. Understanding how the typical customer’s buy cycle maps to key milestones in your sales process can help you more clearly define sales-stages, communicate the requirements for advancing from one stage to another, and produce forecasts that are more accurate.  (See our post on improving forecast accuracy for more on this topic.)
  • Sales/Marketing Alignment.  Much of the work aligning today’s sales and marketing organizations deals with lead management and handoff.  Marketing automation systems that do lead scoring can often benefit by using sales performance data from the CRM system to fine-tune scoring algorithms.  Lead handoff should include data integration that gives sales professionals visibility into what marketing campaigns a prospect has been a part of, webinars they’ve attended, and so on.  The more customer intelligence that can be transferred from marketing to sales, the better prepared for prospect conversations your sales professionals will be.
  • Goal Setting and Quota Assignment.  While you may already be involved in supplying sales management with some of the information they need to set goals and assign quotas, you can often provide valuable details they may not have asked for.  Data on sales trends by product, geographic purchasing patterns, and individual performance can help this part of the planning process but getting that data out of the CRM system may be beyond the typical sales manager’s ability.  Your expertise building reports can make a real difference.  Additionally, being involved in this part of the planning process can give you valuable insights that will help you evaluate compensation management systems, should that be a purchase you’re considering. 
  • Training.  Getting a good return on investments you’ve made in sales productivity solutions requires that your company’s sales professionals know how to use them well.  Making sure training, especially CRM training, is a part of your new-hire onboarding program is key to their productivity and your sanity.  As you add new sales productivity solutions to your arsenal, you’ll also want to make sure that time for training has been factored into the rollout plans.

Sales leaders who truly understand the value of sales operations consider their sales operations lead an important partner in achieving their sales objectives.  Being an active part of the sales planning process will not only result in a better sales plan for your company, it will also empower you with a thorough understanding of how your sales organization operates, what challenges it faces, and what it needs to be successful.

The bottom line is that if you’re not currently part of the sales planning process, you should be.

Let us know about your level of involvement by taking our poll below.

 

As a sales operations professional, how involved are you with the sales planning process?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

Increasing Renewal Sales Through a Disciplined Customer Onboarding Process

Posted on by
Reply

One of the best things about selling software as a service (SaaS) or cloud-based applications is the lower barrier of entry. By not having to make the substantial, up-front investment associated with premise-based solutions, customers can defray costs over time and adopt new technologies without significant capital outlays. Unfortunately, with this blessing comes a curse—the need to make sure customers renew every year.

The most important renewal is after year one, when customers look back for the first time and review whether or not the utility derived from the purchase justifies continued investment. If they conclude that they haven’t made good use of the software/service, renewal is unlikely. When customers don’t routinely renew, their potential lifetime value can never be realized, the cost of sales will remain high, and the goal of an annuity-based business model is unobtainable. As such, we have a challenge: How can we ensure renewal by making sure customers have a positive adoption experience and find real value in our software/service?

A helpful way of tackling this problem is to look at how successful organizations land customers in the first place. World-class sales organizations understand and implement the concept of sales-cycle/buy-cycle alignment. To achieve this, critical steps in the typical prospect’s buying process are identified and mapped to sales activities that lead them through those steps toward a positive purchase decision. A well-designed sales plan will tightly coordinate the selling methodology that guides sales team behavior with the purchase-decision rationale that dictates the behavior of top-tier prospects (for more discussion of sales-cycle/buy-cycle alignment see our Sales Productivity Blueprint on building a successful sales plan). Here’s a diagram to illustrate the concept:

While this may represent the complete sales process for many products, it is woefully inadequate for SaaS or subscription-based services. Without further action, we are leaving customer adoption—and the likelihood of renewal—entirely up to them. To fully realize a customer’s potential lifetime value we must consider their full experience of purchasing and using our software/service. We need to expand our thinking of customer acquisition to include steps we can take to ensure their adoption and successful use of our software/service.

We can leverage the sales-cycle/buy-cycle approach to do this through understanding the customer’s adoption process and developing an onboarding process that aligns with it. This requires first identifying those customer activities that lead to widespread adoption and full utilization of our software/service. Some questions we can ask are:

  • “What will customers most value about our software/service?”
  • “What barriers are they likely to run into?”
  • “Are there particular successes early in the adoption process that can help build momentum?”
  • “Who/what roles in their organization might play a critical role in adoption?”
  • “How will the customer track adoption and utilization?”

Next, we need to determine what we can do to influence the customer’s behavior in a manner that will move them toward successful adoption. Questions to ask include:

  • “How can we help their internal communications to get the word out on what our software/service can do for them?”
  • “What can we do to help them overcome anticipated barriers?”
  • “What early wins should we target?”
  • “What sort of guidance can we provide to facilitate the adoption process, particularly tips on who in the customer’s organization should be involved?”
  • “What metrics can be established that will track adoption and how can we report this back to the customer?”

By clearly documenting the typical customer’s adoption process and what we can do to positively influence it, we are now in a position to define a methodology for onboarding them. Here’s a diagram of what this will look like:

By developing a well-disciplined, onboarding process in this manner, we can have a significant, positive impact on the customer’s overall experience of learning how to get the most out of our software/service. Most importantly, we are not leaving the fate of our renewal sales efforts to chance. Under this expanded framework of how we think about acquiring customers (diagrammed below), the goal of the second phase (i.e., after the initial purchase) is to have them conclude that they can’t live without our software/service when it comes time to renew. If users routinely adopt your solution and you’re already enjoying high customer retention rates, this expanded customer acquisition model can be reserved for customer whose usage rate starts out low or suddenly drops (you are regularly monitoring this, right? — for further discussion of how to protect renewal sales by tracking customer activity, see our earlier post on the topic).

An Expanded View of the Customer Acquisition Process

Who should manage the customer onboarding process depends on how your organization is structured. It may be the service delivery team, marketing may play a role, or it may be up to sales/sales operations. In any event, making sure that such a process is in place is vital for the company’s sales success. As people intimately involved with the first phase of landing a customer (i.e., the initial sale), sales operations professionals are in an ideal position to provide valuable input to the development and implementation of a successful customer onboarding program. Moreover, if one does not exist, you have an excellent opportunity to make yourself a hero to the sales team by leading the inception of one.

Different Lenses – Getting Accurate and Timely Data into your CRM System

Posted on by
Reply

Different Lenses, a regular feature we are launching this month, is a series of blog posts that presents two different perspectives on how to tackle various sales challenges.  By looking at a different problem each month, first through the lens of a sales manager (Brian Geery) and then through the lens of a sales operations professional (Tom Barrieau), we hope to enlighten sales leaders with solutions they can put to use to improve their organization’s sales productivity.

This month’s challenge:  Getting accurate and timely data into your CRM system.

As any sales operations professional knows, a CRM system is only as useful as the data in it is accurate.  Unfortunately, any sales manager can tell you how difficult it is to get busy salespeople to take time out from selling for data-entry.  As such, establishing good CRM data-entry practices is a challenge whose solution is of tremendous value to both parties.  With this in mind, let’s look at this month’s challenge through two different lenses…

The Sales Manager’s Lens

A sales manager, particularly a first-line sales manager (FLSM), is going to tackle this problem by trying to directly influence sales rep behavior.  Specific approaches include…

  • Ensure the onboarding process includes reviewing the salesperson’s position description, with emphasis on the importance of this responsibility:

Maintain up-to-date CRM pipeline and sales forecast information; enter all contact and company information

  • Reinforce good data-entry at sales team meetings
    • Provide verbal recognition to those team members who enter data accurately and timely
    • Review CRM reports during the meeting, leading discussions about how the information helps improve the selling process
  • Meet individually with habitual offenders to provide coaching on this issue
  • Use only data that has been entered into the CRM system to monitor progress against team member’s goals – set the precedent that, if it’s not in the CRM system, in didn’t happen
  • Publish CRM data for all employees to see
  • Develop a reward program for those who enter data accurately and timely

The Sales Operations Professional’s Lens

Conversely, a sales operations professional is going to tackle the problem by optimizing the CRM system itself and making sure it provides value to the sales team.  Specific strategies include…

  • Recognize the importance of the user experience and make sure your CRM system has a good one
    • Identify the most important data – that which must be entered – and make those fields mandatory and easily accessible (on the home screen or no more than one click away)
    • Inform salespeople how and why the information will be used, providing reassurance that if it wasn’t needed, they wouldn’t be asked to enter it
    • Avoid information overload by only showing as much information as is necessary on each screen
    • Review the data entry process with a number of sales professionals; it should be as intuitive and simple as possible with limited key strokes – use drop downs, check boxes, and auto-fill fields where ever possible
  • Reward data-entry by having it return value to the user.  Think “the more they put in, the more they get out.”
    • Deliver customer intelligence – information about companies and people that can help the sales process – based on what data is entered (Note: there are a variety of data subscription services that plug into popular CRM systems – for a list, see our Sales 2.0 solutions guide)
    • Offer links to relevant vertical-market customer deliverables (e.g., collateral, presentations, best practices, etc.) in response to entering a prospect’s industry
    • Make buyer persona information (i.e., customer needs by roles and how your solutions meet those needs) available as soon as job titles are entered
  • Make it easy for salespeople to enter data as close to the point it is gathered as possible. Requiring them to get back to office before entering data will reduce its timeliness and accuracy.
    • Deploy smartphones or tablets to facilitate data-entry and make good use of what would otherwise be dead time (e.g., waiting in a lobby before a call)
    • Subscribe to a phone-based, data-entry service that will transcribe information into your CRM system for reps while they’re on the road
  • Train FLSMs how to pull CRM reports and use them to increase accountability with their teams and improve coaching practices. 
    • Get FLSMs to use CRM-based reports during team meetings to review performance and account activity
    • Empower them with reports they can use to discuss individual performance during one-on-ones, particularly time-in-stage and conversion rate information, to coach improved sales behavior (for a further discussion of these metrics, see our post on key sales pipeline metrics).

The important take-away from viewing this challenge through these two lenses is that CRM data integrity must be owned by both sales managers, particularly FLSMs, and sales operations professionals.  Working together to show salespeople the value of accurate CRM data, they can make good data-entry practices something to count on.

A request for feedback… 

If you like our new Different Lenses approach to discussing how to tackle various sales challenges, please let us know in the comments section.  We’d also be happy to hear any suggestions you might have for sales challenges that you’d like to see us discuss using this format.  Thanks!

Using Baselines and Trends to Refine your Forecasting Process

Posted on by
Reply

In our last blog post, we identified five key pipeline metrics that you can use to create accurate sales forecasts.  Today, we will discuss how two additional concepts, baselines and trends, can allow you to improve forecast accuracy, compare your performance to industry benchmarks, and gain insight into how and where your sales process may require fine tuning.

The techniques we outlined in the Improve Forecast Accuracy with Five Key Pipeline Metrics post are an excellent starting point for leveraging the data contained in your CRM system to project future performance.  We concluded by asserting that forecasting is an historical science – the more you look to the past, the better you will become at predicting the future.

In order to best use historical data to improve forecast accuracy, we must first establish baselines that average each metric over some extended time period – typically a year or two.  You can do this by asking questions such as:

  • What has been the conversion rate, by stage, over the past two years?
  • What has been the time-in-stage for a typical opportunity?
  • What has been the average deal size?
  • How well have opportunities adhered to our top-tier prospect definition?

Establishing baselines for each of the five metrics allows you to understand the fundamentals of your particular pipeline.  For example, knowing the lead-to-close conversion rate will allow you to determine how many leads you need flowing into your pipeline in order to produce a given sales result.  Similarly, knowing how quickly opportunities flow through the pipeline will help you gauge how quickly you can expect to see sales results from a lead generation campaign.

For the two metrics we said needed to be tracked by stage, conversion rate and velocity, a baseline for each stage will allow you to see where your sales process may require some fine-tuning.  For example, if you are seeing a low conversion rate during early stages (i.e., the number of opportunities drop off sharply), it may be an indication that opportunities are being poorly qualified by marketing.  If opportunities are spending too much time in later stages, it may indicate that the quoting and contract negotiation processes are too onerous and may require streamlining.

Finally, establishing baselines allows you to compare yourself to industry benchmarks.  Knowing how your metrics compare to your competitors (thanks to industry analysts, you’d be amazed how much of this information is available over the Internet) will help you assess your competitive position and know where you may need to make improvements.

Once you have established your baselines, you will also need to understand the trend for each metric.  Questions here should include:

  • How has the conversion rate changed over the last 8 quarters?
  • How has the time-in-stage changed?
  • How has the average deal size changed?
  • Has our top-tier prospect definition changed and have we incorporated that into our CRM data entry practices (particularly as it relates to what qualified an opportunity to be in a given stage)?

Understanding how your metrics are trending over time, particularly in comparison to industry benchmarks, will give you insight into whether your sales process is improving or in need of need of additional refinement.  Knowing how they are trending by stage will help you understand where to focus your fine-tuning efforts and gauge the success of your sales process improvement initiatives.  To use our earlier example, improved conversion rates during early stages are a good indication that your lead qualification practices are improving.  Reducing the time-in-stage near the end of the sales process will indicate that you’ve successfully streamlined your closing processes.

Trend data can also be used to assess the impact of external events and inform where you might need to make some changes – either to your sales process or your forecasting model.  For example, if your conversion rates drop during an economic downturn, you may want to ask marketing to increase lead generation activities and get more opportunities into the pipeline.  Similarly, if your time-in-stage goes up during the quoting process, you may want to partner with marketing to develop a strong ROI story that increases prospect urgency by clearly articulating how your product/service will save them money.

Another common use of trend data is to track the seasonality of your business.  By looking a how each pipeline metric varies on a quarterly basis, you can vary your forecast formula to accommodate seasonal fluctuations in the business and produce a more accurate forecast.  Alternatively, you can use it to build a seasonal spiff/promotion strategy that might smooth out the ups and downs of your business.

As we noted in our previous post, it is important to view the development of your forecasting model as a process and not an event.  By establishing clear baselines and then tracking how your pipeline metrics trend over time, this process can move you on a continuous path toward improved forecast accuracy – truly, one of the holy grails of sales management and operations.

Improve Forecast Accuracy with Five Key Pipeline Metrics

Posted on by
4

“My forecasts are always 100% accurate. Unfortunately, my customers don’t always buy when they are supposed to.”

— Anonymous Salesperson

While customers don’t always do what we expect of them, sales pipelines do behave in a logical manner — as long as you know what to look for.

If your company’s sales process involves multiple stages where salespeople interact with numerous decision makers, knowing which data to extract from your CRM system to build a forecast can be difficult — particularly when many CRM systems don’t automatically track what’s most valuable.  Using these five pipeline metrics, you can significantly improve your forecast accuracy:

  1. Opportunity Quantity — the simplest of the four, this is a measure of how many opportunities are in the pipeline
  2. Opportunity Size — another easy one, this is the projected dollar (Euro, Yen, etc.) value of each opportunity and is often expressed as an “average deal size”
  3. Conversion Rate — assessed on a stage-by-stage basis, this measures what percentage of opportunities at one stage typically make it through to the next
  4. Velocity — also measured on a stage-by-stage basis, this is a measure of how much time opportunities typically spend in each stage (Note: this one is often left out by CRM systems – if so, search for a plug-in that will help you track this metric)
  5. Opportunity Quality — the hardest one to quantify, this is an assessment of how precisely an opportunity matches a predefined definition of a well-qualified sales lead (another one often left out by CRM systems, this can be easily added using a custom field)

Turning our attention to how each of these metrics will enter our forecast model, Opportunity Number and Opportunity Size are fairly straightforward.  Multiply the former by the latter (assuming the latter is expressed as the average deal size), and you have the overall value of your pipeline if everything closes (don’t we wish!).  This will act as the baseline upon which the rest of our calculations will be based.

The next metric, Conversion Rate, will be used to peel off the value of those opportunities in each stage that, based on historical analysis, will not close.  If you’ve done your homework and understand the conversion rates for each stage, you can determine how much revenue you can anticipate coming out of each stage by multiplying the value of opportunities in each stage by the conversion rate for that stage and by the conversion rates for all subsequent stages.  An example will help illustrate the math required here…

  • Suppose we have four sales stages with the following conversion rates:
    • Between stage one and two: 25%
    • Between stage two and three: 35%
    • Between stage three and four: 50%
    • Between stage four and close: 65%
  • To figure out the value of your pipeline qualified by conversion rate, you would add together the following values:
    • (The value of opportunities in stage one) * .25 * .35 * .50 * .65
    • (The value of opportunities in stage two) * .35 * .50 * .65
    • (The value of opportunities in stage three) * .50 * .65
    • (The value of opportunities in stage four) * .65

Velocity enters into our model to allow for sales cycles that are longer than the desired forecast period.  If, using historical data, we know the average time-in-stage for each stage, we can calculate a forecast for a given time period by taking into account the velocity of our pipeline.  Here’s how: if our above example has a one year sales cycle that’s perfectly uniform (i.e., opportunities are in each stage for three months), a quarterly forecast would simply be the value of opportunities in stage 4 multiplied by the corresponding conversion rate of .65.

The last variable to consider is Deal Quality.  This is tricky because how well an opportunity adheres to our definition of a top-tier prospect is subjective.  As such, deal quality is usually represented by a weighting factor applied to each opportunity.  For example, “hot” opportunities (i.e., those that match our top-tier prospect definition perfectly) may have a weighting factor of 1.0 – meaning that 100% of their value is passed along to the formula we’ve developed above.  Prospects that are only “warm” (i.e., those that loosely match our top-tier prospect definition) may have a weighting factor of .65 – meaning that only 65% of their value will be used in our calculations.  While they introduce a little “slop” into our math, these weighting factors give your salespeople a badly needed means to qualify opportunities in their individual pipelines.  This can go a long way toward neutralizing an accurate forecast’s worst enemy: sandbagging.  What’s important is to have a clear top-tier prospect definition that everybody agrees upon and a clear understanding of the weighting factors associated with the deal quality labels you allow your salespeople to use (e.g., hot/warm/cold).

While this process can be refined in a variety of ways, it is an excellent starting point that you can use to develop your own forecasting model.  What’s critical is to view the development of your forecasting model as a process and not an event.  Conversion rates and velocities will vary with the ups and downs of the economy, the season, and the competitive landscape.  As such, you will need to constantly refine your forecasting formula based on how these and other variables impact your key pipeline metrics over time.  In this regard, accurate forecasting is an historical science – the more you look to the past, the better you will become at predicting the future.

Update:  In a continuation of this discussion, we have a new blog post that describes the use of baselines and trends to developing sales forecasts. Entitled “Using Baselines and Trends to Refine your Forecasting Process,” this post discusses how to use historical data to improve forecast accuracy.

Our New Look and Feel

Posted on by
Reply

For those of you who have been to The Sales Operations blog before, you might notice things look a little different, as of today.  Here’s the scoop…

As was recently announced, The Sales Operations Blog has new sponsors.  As part of this change, we’ve updated the appearance of the blog and added some new features that should make finding and navigating content easier.  Our goal is to make the blog not just a destination for the latest thoughts and insights of its authors, but a resource that has enduring value for sales operations professionals.  With this in mind, here are a few notable changes we’ve made:

  • Recategorization of content.  We’ve reduced the number of categories and made accessing them easier through a menu selection that takes you to a new Categories page.  From this page, you can drill down into each category to select and view individual posts from that category’s archive or see a list of excerpts.
  • Streamlined reading experience. Reading posts off the home page is now easier thanks to the reduction of extraneous information. By removing the sidebar on the page for viewing single posts, we hope you’ll find it easier to focus on the content and get the most out of every post.
  • Easier sharing and commenting.  We’ve added links to a few additional social media sites for sharing content and enabled quoting in the comments section.  Little changes sure, but we’re hoping this fine tuning will enrich the user experience.

We know that you come here for information that can help you run your sales organization better and are committed to providing quality content that supports that goal.  In the meantime, we hope these changes will make your experience while at The Sales Operations Blog more pleasant and productive.

If you ever have suggestions regarding how we can improve The Sales Operations Blog, please don’t hesitate to let us know by emailing us at feedback@salesoperationsblog.com.

Thanks,

— Tom and Brian

Greetings from the New Sponsors

Posted on by
Reply

We’d like to extend our sincere thanks to Marci Reynolds for her gracious welcome and for the outstanding job she has done establishing The Sales Operations Blog as a valued resource for sales operations professionals around the globe.  We’ve got big shoes to fill and are committed to carrying forward the standard of excellence she has set for timely, relevant, and well-researched thought leadership that delivers actionable guidance to our readers.

We’re excited to share our insights into the science of selling at a time when sales operations is really taking off.  As the wealth of information and opinion available over the Internet allows prospective customers to enter the sales cycle more informed than ever before, the challenges facing today’s sales organizations are considerable:

  • Sales cycles are compressed
  • More leads are necessary to close a given amount of business
  • Prospects demand knowledgeable salespeople who understand their business

While automation offers the promise of greater efficiency, it also raises its own challenges; selecting the right tool, ensuring sales force adoption, and making sure you’ve got your processes optimized before automating them.  Finally, a weak economy is driving the need for improved productivity wherever possible.  With sales leaders needing to keep their eyes on the pipeline and their time spent on managing the team, it is no wonder they increasingly turn to sales operations professionals to manage these complex issues.  As a result, sales operations is truly a career in its ascendency.

As sales productivity consultants working with companies that sell technology and related services, we spend our days talking to sales operations leaders, VPs of sales, and CEOs about their sales challenges and opportunities.  Because of our diverse backgrounds and regular conversations with so many different companies, we are able to have a well-rounded perspective on the world of sales operations, spot trends, cross-pollinate best practices, and note which innovations promise to deliver real value.

So, we have some great ideas and are anxious to put them in motion!  In addition to maintaining Marci’s high quality of content, we hope to leverage the views of other thought leaders we know, tap into your viewpoint through polls and surveys, and provide greater utility as an information resource through the implementation of improved searching and navigation features.

Please feel free to let us know if you have any suggestions regarding how we can make the blog a more valuable destination.  We’d be happy to hear from you at feedback@salesoperationsblog.com.

— Tom Barrieau and Brian Geery

Thomas Barrieau, Managing Partner - Sales Productivity ArchitectsBrian Geery, Managing Partner - Sales Productivity Architects

Resolving Conflicts – The Sales Operations Professional as Interdepartmental Liaison

Posted on by
1

In a recent blog post, we discussed how sales operations could help build a more sales-oriented corporate culture by adopting the role of interdepartmental liaison. This concept of sales operations acting as intermediary between sales and other departments is an important one if we are to harness a company’s full resources in support of sales.

Strife can easily arise when needs and priorities do not align between departments. For example, finance may want to control costs by reducing tradeshow attendance or holiday gifts, while sales sees these as important business development expenses. Human resources may want sales participation at a company function, while sales feels their time would be better spent elsewhere. IT may select a web conferencing tool based on manageability, while sales prefers one that provides a better customer experience.

In all these cases, finding common ground, facilitating compromise, and negotiating priorities requires a respectful understanding of both perspectives. Sales operations may work with sales to prioritize a tradeshow schedule or negotiate an allowance with finance, subject to hitting a certain revenue target. They might persuade human resources that only sales managers need to attend the function and not front-line salespeople. They may even have to demonstrate to sales how they can use the less desirable web conferencing tool and still deliver a favorable customer experience.

This need to understand different viewpoints explains why many successful sales operations professionals come from diverse backgrounds. Marketing experience or close collaboration with IT or product development teaches you their language and provides insight into where mutually beneficial solutions might come from. In the absence of this experience, you can still cultivate an appreciation of these different perspectives by spending time with department heads to better understand their goals and the “why” behind their priorities.

We should note here that this liaison role is not one of neutral moderator. Quite the contrary; it is a sales operations professional’s job to advocate on behalf of sales. To be sure, there will be times when another department’s needs must be championed for successful collaboration, but for the most part, sales operations will be lobbying for sales.

As liaison, your goal should be that when other departments want to communicate or interact in some other way with sales, they come to you first. When sales needs something from another department, they come to you. In this manner, you can design alignment and efficiency into the process from the ground up.

Elements of a Successful Sales Plan – A Template for Simplified Sales Planning

Posted on by
1

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight David Eisenhower

“He who fails to plan, plans to fail.” — Proverb

“Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” — Thomas Alva Edison

With the end of the year fast approaching, many sales leaders are turning their attention to planning for the coming year.  The quotes above all refer to the importance of planning and can easily be applied to sales plans.  The problem for many of us, however, is where to begin.

To help our clients manage what can be a daunting task, Sales Productivity Architects put together the sales plan outline shown below.  It’s very much a living document that changes over time and is typically used by clients in whole or in part; not all elements are essential to all sales organizations.  What is essential is to invest the appropriate amount of time to prepare a sales plan that will provide you with a roadmap to sales success, anticipate challenges to be overcome, and help you gain consensus among key stakeholders and your sales team on priorities for the coming year.

When providing this to clients, we suggest they first review the plan elements listed below and determine which ones will help their sales organization succeed.  Then, we counsel them to schedule time, preferably offsite, with the appropriate people to write the details of their sales plan.  Attendees should include the sales management team, plus the head of marketing and the head of sales operations.  Additional personnel to invite for discussions that touch upon their roles include the departmental liaisons for IT, human resources, and finance.

If you’re starting from scratch, set reasonable goals.  A fully fleshed out sales plan may take considerable time to develop and best be tackled in phases.  The very act of planning will bring to awareness those critical success factors around which you will want to build your strategy.  As your strategy evolves, the annual planning process will involve incrementally refining your existing plan based on what worked in the past year, what didn’t, and what new challenges need to be addressed.  Herein lies one of the most valuable aspects of conducting regular sales planning — it gives you the opportunity to fine-tune your sales engine over time.

We’d love to hear from readers what additional elements they find valuable to include in a sales plan.  Please let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Update:  Due the popularity of this post, we have put together a greatly expanded discussion of this topic as part of our Sales Productivity Blueprint series.  You can download the Elements of a Successful Sales Plan PDF from the Sales Productivity Architects web site.

Sales Plan Elements

Top Tier Prospect Definition

  • What are the defining characteristics of prospects that are mostly likely to buy?
  • What are the decision maker’s profiles (buyer personas)?
  • How are non-prospects defined (those we should not pursue)?

Buy Cycle and Sales Cycle

  • What are the key elements of the Buy Cycle (physical actions a prospect must take in order to buy)?
  • How will we lead prospects through the Buy Cycle?
  • What are the key elements of the Sales Cycle (physical actions a sales professional must take in order to sell)?
  • What quantity of each of these actions are required to achieve sales goals (lead to close ratio)? 

Go To Market Strategy

  • How will we reach our target audience of prospects?
  • How will we engage our target prospect in conversation?
  • What are the reasons (catalysts) a prospect will have interest/motivation to buy?

Barriers to be Overcome

  • What are the barriers to success (competition from other companies, decision to do nothing, internal solution, no time, etc.)?
  • What are common objections?
  • How will we remove objections in the marketing and sales process?

Competitive Positioning

  • What is the definition of “competition?”
    • Companies?
    • Competing priorities?
    • Time?
    • ROI?
    • Others?
  • How will we win?

Value Proposition and Sales Presentation

  • How do we present our value proposition?
  • What is unique?
  • What is compelling? Why should a prospect buy now?
  • How is an ROI achieved? Reduced expense, increased revenue, or both?
  • What endorsements from trusted/respected authorities can be used?
  • Do we need to educate before we can sell?

Sales/Marketing Alignment

  • What is the marketing message?
  • What are the key touch-points at which the sales team will deliver this message (email signatures, inbound and outbound voicemail messages, automated attendant scripts, website visitor experience, key phone talking points, written correspondence, recruitment ads, font selection, and logo design)?
  • How are leads nurtured and scored?
  • How and when are leads handed off from marketing to sales?
  • What shared metrics can be established to ensure alignment between sales and marketing?
  • What initiatives do we pursue in: Public relations? Business Development? Marketing? Advertising?

Goal Setting and Quota Assignment

  • What is the team revenue or booking goal?
  • What are the individual revenue or booking goals?
  • What is the new customer acquisition goal?
  • What is the existing customer sales goal?
  • What other goals should be established? (Examples: multi-year deals, market share, opportunities unseated from competitors, strategic accounts) 

Pipeline Management and Forecasting

  • What will be tracked in the CRM system?
  • How will we forecast bookings?
  • What management reports are needed?  How will they be used to drive accountability?
  • How can we use CRM to assist the sales effort on a daily basis?
  • How are the sales stages defined and what are the related forecast percentages?

Talent Recruitment and Hiring

  • What is the marketing message to attract top candidates?
  • What is the candidate sourcing strategy?
  • What is the candidate interview and selection plan?

Sales Position Profile

  • What sales skills, behavioral characteristics, and qualifications / track record are required to succeed?
  • How can we make the corporate culture into one that optimizes sales success?
  • What are the primary responsibilities?  All responsibilities?
  • Candidate qualifications?
  • First 90-day goals?
  • Position specifics: what is the quota, base salary, total comp at goal, benefits, territory, reporting relationship, and travel requirements?

Compensation Strategy

  • What is the compensation strategy of similar positions?
  • What is the base salary?
  • What is the variable compensation strategy?
  • Incentives? Non-monetary rewards?
  • Commission payment eligibility?

Team Meetings

  • What is the agenda and frequency of sales team meetings?
  • What is the agenda and frequency for Sales Manager / Sales Team Member individual meetings?

Training

  • What is the new-hire training plan? Key learning objectives?
  • How will we know participants have learned what they have been taught? What are our knowledge checkpoints?
  • What ongoing training do we need to provide?

Sales Automation and Technology Support

  • What sales productivity solutions do we need beyond CRM?
  • How will they integrate with our CRM system?
  • What is our mobile strategy?
  • How can automation be used to improve per rep productivity?
  • How does the Marketing organization’s automation strategy dovetail with Sales?
  • How can we improve the management, delivery, and access of information and resources critical to the sales process (i.e., Sales Enablement)?