Your Guide to a successful Business and Entrepreneur venture with tools to self diagnose what ails y
Sales effectiveness— find more, win more, keep more customers to drive sales growth. Do you find yourself lying awake at night, mind racing with questions and concerns about your job or organization?
It is normal for most Entrepreneurs, industry captains and even employees to stay up late thinking through how to find and cultivate opportunities to grow their own practice or to help our clients grow their businesses.
There’s a common thread to questions that keep all of us awake and that our clients say also keep them awake:
How do we find more, win more, and keep more customers?
With new competitors coming into the market, do we need to rethink how we work with our clients and/or identify net new customers?
Should we double down on our current products and services or focus on innovating new ones?
Ever used WebMD to self-diagnose an illness? Let’s apply the same thinking to diagnose your organization’s growth challenges and help you start getting more sleep at night.
Marketing effectiveness — Get the right message to the right customers at the right time to drive the right leads to your sales team
Common Symptoms:
Budgets continue to be reduced but expectations remain high, so how do we do more with less?
How do we improve our speed to market on all fronts — content generation, campaign execution, product launches, etc.?
Do we truly understand our customers at a detailed enough level to be most effective in our demand generation activities?
When to seek assistance:
If you don’t have the technology or systems (e.g., content management, campaign automation, lead tracking, etc.) in place to enable your marketing strategy
If you aren’t getting the expected results from investments you have already made in marketing, leading executives to question the value that marketing is providing to the organization
Treatment options:
Automation. Take a look at your marketing processes and customer base to determine if your organization is ready for marketing automation software or to see if you are getting the most of investments you have already made.
Customer insight. Conduct a thorough voice of the customer (VOC) project to understand the different customers you serve at a detailed and data-rich level. The insights you get from this effort should be actionable and translate to meaningful changes in your go-to-market activities
Sales effectiveness— find more, win more, keep more customers to drive sales growth
Common Symptoms:
I’m spending money on training and technology for my sales team, but I’m not getting the results I expect.
My sales team seems to be ’farming’ old business and struggles to ‘hunt’ net new business.
We aren’t hitting our goals, but our sales compensation payouts are still higher than they should be.
When to seek assistance:
Your sales growth has declined or stagnated for several quarters and you aren’t sure why
Your best sales team members and leaders are leaving the organization, and it seems to be more and more difficult to attract top performers
You’ve spent money on sales training and development, but haven’t seen a change in the behaviors of your sales team
Treatment Options:
Focus on structure and compensation. It will be tempting to treat your issues with more training, but if you are experiencing these symptoms, it is time to take a hard look at your sales structure and compensation plans to ensure they are aligned with how your customers want to buy from you.
Focus on Middle Management. Sales managers usually got there because of their ability to drive sales, not their ability to coach their team. Filling this gap in sales coaching at the middle management level to drive meaningful engagement with the front line team will improve the performance of your sales team more than just about any other investment you can make.
Self-diagnosed? What should you do next?
Hopefully, this discussion has helped you self-diagnose your company’s growth challenges. Contact us to assist you with more self analysing methods and tools.
