More, Better, Faster, Improve Win Faster...

I have spent a lot of my quiet time during my break thinking about efficient growth and go-to-market strategies. I do believe that in 2024 the winning sales leaders will be data-driven, bottom-line focused and scrupulous with their spending.

In short, there are only so many tangible ways to achieve the kind of sales efficiency your business expects which are:

• Generate more leads of the same quality and better quality, for the same or lower cost.
• Turn more of your leads into closed deals.
• Convert your opportunities at larger sale prices.
• Make customer retention a priority.

At the end of the day, these are the levers we have to decrease our Customer Acquisition Costs, increase Customer Lifetime Value, Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue, and Improve Retention.

How will the best Go-To-Market teams make efficient and effective growth happen in 2024?

Automating the Early Sales Cycle

The advancements in Sales Automation and AI capabilities are incredible and for those companies who incorporate AI tools and Sales Automation will supercharge their momentum towards automating early parts of the sales cycle.

In practice, I see something like this.

• Using AI-driven personalization to draw on rich data to serve an optimized web experience.
• Using Smart lead forms minimize friction by testing and serving the right number of fields.
• Automated lead routing puts the prospect into the right sales motion and generative AI creates customized follow-up on behalf of the ideal seller.

We need to start reserving our human resources for the highest-impact part of the cycle, which is making connections, solving problems, and creating real-life relationships.?

Most Sales Leaders have no idea just how many sales opportunities their teams miss out on. This is an easy test to do. Having attended quite a few events last year, I visited over 600 websites and filled out the web forms using my own contact information that is valid and accurate.

The results were shocking. 65% of companies just did not respond with any reach out at all. Yes, absolutely nothing.

This should not be the case and we will see more companies use automation to stop this unnecessary opportunity leakage.

To increase speed to lead, improve data quality, shorten sales cycles, optimize spending, and improve overall website performance we need to remove hurdles for both the prospects and the teams trying to convert them into customers. It is impossible to do this without having a truly connected tech stack.

Transaction vs. Conversation

Many companies selling in the B2B space today use a combination of GTM strategies from Account Based Marketing, Demand Generation, Inbound, Sales Enablement, Inside Sales, Field Sales, Channel Sales, Self-Service etc.

Where you are using sales reps to find leads and make calls to get a meeting, in 2024, you going to have to move away from the old way of just calling to get a meeting. Yes, we all want the meeting and you sales rep will eventually get that but encourage your sales reps to focus on having conversations instead of just making 50 dials a day. If you can learn to stop the transaction calling and move to a real-human conversation, your prospects will get to know your sales rep, like them and trust them. It's not magic. Its charisma.

Don’t underestimate how hard it is to get out of the transaction mode but get out of that mode.

Know, Like and Trust should be your focus.

Interconnected Data for Customer 360

This trend will continue into 2024 and beyond. Sales Leaders who are part of Go-To-Market Teams have realized that just having access to location, employee size and industry data is simply not enough to really activate their Go-To-Market Strategies. This is why the winning sales teams use first-party, second-party and third-party data to create a 360-degree view of their prospects and customers. What is key here, is not just having the data to view in a dashboard but inside their CRM that allows them to turn insights into action at a moment’s notice.

This is why the investment into business intelligence, data integration and data analytics increased in 2023 and will continue to increase in 2024.

You must make your data more accessible and connected so that you have your customer data, operational data, and intelligence data available inside your Sales and Marketing CRM.

Warm Calling Over Cold Calling

Cold Calling won’t disappear but once you have a customer 360 in place, your sales reps will be doing more warm calling.

The change will be due to having actionable intelligence available from live intent data and buying signals.

This will mean that your sales reps and marketing teams can now use high-value data points like website visits, new hires, news updates and so many more to create a reliable picture of which accounts are really interested in your solutions.

The bottom line is that your buyers expect relevancy and well-timed outreach and as I mentioned earlier, using Sales Automation and generative AI, your B2B sales teams can achieve this efficiently. When your sales reps pick up the phone and make a call, your prospect will be primed and ready to talk to them.

Warmer leads and better timing will most certainly give your sales reps a happier environment to sell in.

While on the topic of phone calls, phone numbers are crucial for engaging with your customers and more so now with Google announcing that they are going to step up enforcement of spam controls in 2024. So, the smartest GTM teams will increase their reliance on mobile phone number quality in 2024.

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Quota Attainment Gaps

This is especially true for sales enablement GTM strategies where the sales rep research prospect accounts to identify potential ready to buy accounts, crafting personalized outreach and doing the ongoing follow-ups, we are all very familiar with.

Generative AI will deliver tangible results in 2024. It will be like a sales rep having a dedicated assistant that does the research for them, finding potential ready to buy accounts, suggesting the next best action, crafting the personalized outreach and more.

There will be a greater urgency in deploying the right technology at scale so that there are exponential increases in productivity but for those GTM teams not staying ahead of the curve, the quota attainment gaps will widen. At the end of the day, it is about doing what you can to allow your sellers to focus more of their time, making real connections with customers, negotiating, and closing deals.

In 2024, we need to sell and win faster than ever before.

Smarketing - Unification, not Alignment

I am really excited about seeing further improvements in this area in 2024. Looking back over 2023, many of our customers who we have onboarded onto LeadSquared Sales & Marketing CRM reported better alignment between sales and marketing teams.

Having a unified CRM platform that can serve the entire customer lifecycle has resulted in companies being able to break down the barriers between sales and marketing. In 2024 it’s not going to be alignment but rather unification.

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In closing, the pursuit of a unified customer relationship management system often leads to a transformative success.

Many companies will continue to be confronted with familiar challenges like disjointed CRM systems, departmental silos, complex legacy systems that impede holistic customer insights but making this strategic shift not only unifies disparate data sources but will usher in automated workflows and proactive customer sights, painting a comprehensive canvas of customers behavior across segments, regions etc. These insights will close the feedback loop for GTM teams so you can continue to anticipate needs and refine strategies, ultimately resulting in revenue growth and an expanded customer base.

Isn’t that what we all strive for….

I'm always up for a chat to help your Go-To-Market teams dominate 2024!

Let's make 2024 our year, together!

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