Selling in the Age of Ceaseless Change

I just read the full "Selling in the Age of Ceaseless Change: The 2018-2019 Sales Performance Report by CSO Insights" and I highly suggest that you read the entire report, especially the recommendations and chapter 6 (Lessons Learned from Sales Leaders). There are some great ideas there. However, I've highlighted a few items that jumped out to me either as good reminders or as things I can personally work on; I hope they spark some ideas for you too. 

Not surprising are the four main objectives behind performance improvement efforts are (1) Improving lead generation, (2) Capturing new accounts, (3) Expanding penetration into existing customers, and (4) Increasing win rates.

The top performing companies have sellers that meet or exceed customer's expectations at providing insights and perspective, which makes sense if they are a trusted advisor who is providing trusted and useful insights. Customer-centric cultures help create and expose those insights to the sales team so they can provide a perspective to their customers. This is, of course, only part of the overall relationship from stranger to repeat buyer (aka, the stuff before and after the sales process).

The early part of that process is where leads are generated and nurtured. It's important to have a formal and jointly agreed upon lead generation process, rules and definitions between sales and marketing for nurturing leads that are ready for sales to win.

Opportunity planning is incredibly important and impactful to close new business. While sales might catch and work perfect leads, they still need a plan to win the deal and leveraging your CRM to help the sales team work those plans is just as important.

Focusing on your current top accounts needs to be a top priority for customer success, just as much as it is for the sales team. But like opportunity planning, the data in the report shows that creating account plans is linked to higher win rates. But back to being customer-centric, the account plans need to help the customer solve business problems.

Across all of this is sales enablement, marketing and front-line sales management. That can cover everything from coaching, creating consistent messaging, training skills, improving behaviours, cross-team collaboration, or a number of other topics. There is always room to improve!