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    Make your 2016 sales plan easy to execute

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    A new calendar year is coming up. Your business planning is underway. With existing customers to keep happy, tough competition and high expectations for growth, your sales execution will be key. Once you’ve done your market research and decided on a strategy, it’s time to get hands-on about how to actually get it done when daily operations kick in.

    Set your business targets

    What will be “the number” for next year? Specify your revenue streams. How much will be derived from renewed business by existing customers? Upselling into existing accounts? Also, define how your sales team will be organized based on the type of customer or the level of complexity involved in your product and service offers. Will you have separate teams for hunting and upselling to existing accounts? Do you need to strengthen cross-functional teams and encourage additional collaboration in order to support new product and service offerings?

    Your sales process serves to create a common language when speaking about your sales activities, which in itself removes friction"
    George Brontén

    Conducting your sales team - an art and a science

    Photo credit: Phil Roeder

    Break down your goals

    Once you have your sales targets and defined the sources from where they will spring, you’ll need to break down the goals - all the way to the individual level. Make sure you design this exercise so that each manager and sales person understand their business objectives, leading indicators and activity goals and accept them as achievable. You are more than welcome to use our free tool for this exercise.

    Make the sales process your foundation

    A well-designed sales process is the foundation to monitor how well you’re executing according to plan and getting everyone in the right sales rhythm. It’s not just about having your stages as a drop down list in your CRM. It needs to contain qualifying criteria, milestones aligned to the buying decision process as well as guiding collateral and tools. Your sales process serves to create a common language when speaking about your sales activities, which in itself removes friction. 

    You need it to speed up the ramp up time for new hires, ensure forecast accuracy, enable sales coaching, easily make adjustments to your sales plan (here’s a tool to help you create your sales process) and make sure nothing falls between cracks.

    Define KPIs

    Download our realistic goal setting kitWith your teams in place, clear goals established and a sales process to support the execution of your sales strategy, define the key performance indicators you need to make sure that everyone is performing at the levels needed to reach the targets. I’d recommend using the framework laid out by the authors of Cracking The Sales Management Code - apply business results, objectives and activities to keep things in order and not mix apples with oranges when analyzing your sales performance metrics..

    Increase and align new skills

    In order to execute on your new plan, will your team leaders need to improve their managerial and coaching skills? Is there potential to increase the capabilities of your sales people to co-create value with customers in the sales cycle? Will sales and marketing need to align better and learn from each other to become more effective? When investing in sales training, make sure to integrate the new skills and tools into
    your sales improvement system to make sure they are not quickly forgotten.

    Get the right tools to maximize effectiveness

    Make sure you get the best possible tools and technology to help execute your sales strategy. Just because the sales team has been using your old CRM system in the past does not mean it’s the best solution moving forward. If you’re in a business where every deal counts, you’ll need more specialized solutions. Membrain - our offering - is specifically designed for teams working with complex b2b sales, to execute a sales strategy and continuously guide everyone towards reaching targets.

    Accountability & follow-through

    Once the daily work kicks in, everyone needs to take the responsibility to perform according to plan. Your sales managers need to hold people accountable to doing what was promised, while providing the coaching and resources needed to assist their teams whenever they encounter obstacles.

    Always iterate and improve

    With the world changing faster than ever before, things will happen that force changes to both your plan and how you execute. If you’ve completed the above exercises and have the tools to change and support alignment, your 2016 journey will be a lot easier to undertake. 

     

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    George Brontén
    Published September 2, 2015
    By George Brontén

    George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.

    Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn