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    Is It Time for a Little Fall Cleaning in Your Sales Organization?

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    My wife decided to clean up the “storage room” in our basement this weekend. A small room with lots of (rarely used) stuff... Old shoes, jackets, bags, rackets, books, etc. Needless to say, we got rid of a lot of stuff that was just taking up unnecessary space. This kind of exercise is really rewarding, as you get rid of things that no longer serve a purpose and free up space for things that you value.

    This got me thinking about sales enablement content and the sales process. How often do companies throw old stuff out and ensure that the right content, steps, and milestones are kept front and center for your sales and customer success teams? And where can we find inefficiencies and ineffectiveness in our customer-facing workflows? Where should we be looking to keep what is important and get rid of the crap?

    Here are a few areas I came up with, where we as sales organizations can become more efficient and effective by conducting some “Fall cleaning.” I’ll bet you can come up with more.

    How to Declutter Your Prospecting Toolbox

    When we reach out to prospects, is everyone up-to-date on which playbooks work the best, and that we’re not using out-of-date messaging and positioning? If automation is used, are we certain that we’re not spamming valuable prospects with mundane messages that make them add us to their spam filters? Does everyone understand our ideal customer profile? Do we have a clear definition on when to add a prospect to the forecastable pipeline? Do we spend too much time researching our prospects, and why? Or maybe salespeople are doing too much research before they reach out? Is important customer information hidden behind the gates of old systems? Do we know which information adds value and what only adds noise?

    How to Clean Up Your Opportunity & Pipeline Management

    When did we last do an aggregated win/loss analysis to determine what's working and what’s not working? Is the sales process designed to drive the right opportunity management behaviors on the sales team? Do sales managers have the visibility they need to do a good job coaching their teams to higher performance? Have we embedded tailored training content that is up-to-date and speeds up the ramp-up times for new hires? Have we kept the sales process “as simple as possible, but not simpler” (as Einstein would have said) or are we requiring our people to fill out 40 fields on the creation of a new opportunity?

    Is your sales process “as simple as possible, but not simpler?”

    Can we remove the fluff and ensure that step and milestone is aligned with how our potential buyer will be making their decisions?

    How to Polish Up Customer Success

    Once we have sold to a customer, do we hand over all the right information, and promises made, to the customer success teams? Or are we dropping the baton and forcing customers to repeat themselves? Do they start looking for a new supplier before we’ve even delivered what we agreed to achieve together?

    How to Organize and Update Account Growth Planning

    Has account planning become an administrative exercise that focuses on aggregating information in various excel sheets and powerpoint slides? Do we have a clear plan of action to enable collaborative growth? How do we ensure that all the key information is easily accessible and collaborative across our internal teams and in relationship with our customers?

    How to ‘Marie Kondo’ Your Dashboards

    It’s easy to have a love/hate relationship with CRM dashboards. Often, anyone with access rights creates a new dashboard when a specific need for information arises. These impromptu and ad hoc dashboards seem useful at first, but when they’re never deleted, they stack up. This leads to hundreds of dashboards and nobody can find their way around, like trying to navigate a house stacked to the ceiling with hoarded goods. Which dashboards are critical to understanding your numbers, and which ones need to go? Can your team get in the habit of deleting one-offs as soon as they’re done with them?.

    How to Tidy Up Your Sales Enablement Content

    Any sales enablement content, internal or external, will eventually get old, and have various degrees of value to your teams, prospects and customers. Are you tracking your content age and statistics? How often is each piece used? Which pieces are viewed and which are ignored? ; Which pieces are liked by staff and customers? Purge old, unused content from your content libraries.

    In larger organizations, you may have a dedicated sales operations team, tasked to coordinate the systems side of marketing, sales, and customer success workflows. In smaller companies, these tasks may not have a designated person in charge, leaving the work up to each department. In either case, it pays to make it a priority to regularly clean up and clear out the excess in your sales organization.

    I believe Membrain is the tool to help you with these tasks. With Membrain, it’s easy to see what parts of your system are working and what isn’t, whether it’s tasks in your sales process or content in your content enablement system. And just as easy to update the process and the content library to purge what you no longer love and use, to make room for what’s actually effective.

    What other areas of your sales organization could be improved by doing a little Fall cleaning and clearing? I’d love to hear about it.

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    George Brontén
    Published September 28, 2022
    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