5 ESSENTIALS FOR SALES AND GROWTH

So a trillion dollar market, huh?

According to Box CEO Aaron Levie, we are amidst the creation of a trillion dollar enterprise software market. While information technology swept through enterprises in the 90's and 2000's aiming to automate the back-office, this decade is about extending the front-office. Ultimately how we discover, interact, sell and support our customers and partners; and how products are designed, launched and marketed.

As business leaders we are driven by one guaranteed constant; change.  So the question then is how do we strategically posture ourselves to remain agile and grow within our ever changing environment? What can we do to accelerate growth, drive customer loyalty, engage our partners more, and sustain the motivation of our teams? How do we get to and stay in the land of exceeded projections and profits?

Peter Drucker tells us that one of the biggest challenges professionals face is focus.

"There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all." Peter Drucker

So what are "the most important things"? More specifically, as leaders how do we align our corporate strategic objectives throughout the diverse components of our sales driven organization? Growth in today’s technically inclined world is expected to be fast and furious. Whether it is shareholders, boards, investors, peers, substitutes, new entrants etc., the need to perform faster and better is prominent. Considering this demand for performance acceleration, here are 5 areas that if we ‘focus’ on will help us flow.

Hire A’s.

According to the folks over at Openview Labs, smart sales leaders know that recruiting top talent for their sales team never stops being a priority. They suggest that rather than just hiring when the need arises, there should be a pipeline of top quality talent in the HR hopper to ensure a steady flow of high grade, result oriented producers. The greatest of leaders and companies practice this obsessively.

It really shouldn't matter if you have a current opening in your sales team. The priority for sales managers and HR must be to find and nurture top talent at all times. We should think about our sales teams as conduits of expansion and growth, and look to constantly align talent discovery to strategic corporate objectives.

“You can tell a lot about a manager by observing the people around him. A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s”

Forbes contributor, Dan Schawbel on Donald Rumsfeld: Leadership Lessons From Business To Politics.

2) Lead Gen, Lead Gen, Lead Gen

I know that sharing the importance of pipeline activity sounds like common sense, but as the late Covey would say it, “common sense is not always common practice”.

Lead generation makes the list because it's a crucial piece that easily gets overlooked, especially when things are good, and monies are flowing.

I like to revisit our lead generation processes, whether inbound or outbound, and see how it can be improved. I’ll poke holes at it, challenge it, and speak to the customers (current and old) to listen for key take away and experiences. Once the machine has been lubricated, I then start to look at ancillary ways to engage and optimize sales. But tread intelligently, do your research and look for proven systems and processes that amplify values and your efforts of driving brand influence.

3) Have a White-Glove Affair

Nurture your customer relationships. They have options. Often times plenty. Your customers should rally around your brand, while you intently create the type of experiences that promote the strongest of bonds.

It’s cyclical. In fact, I believe in this so much, that with REV, we’ve added bonding to the tail end of our consumer decision framework, and implemented key processes around it. Customer success should always be our greatest motivation.

Drive value creation. Engage them continuously, and for the record, it doesn’t matter how mature the product or service is, continue to glean from your customers’ voice. Their behaviors will evolve, and if you are not paying attention, someone else will happily attend to those needs.

Do this, and in return you will have the depth of insights and loyalty to go back to and further monetize your offerings.

"It costs 10x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one" - Bill Schmarzo, The Dean of Big Data

4) Now Get Married

Ok so maybe a bit too far, but customer engagement is all about getting your customers to share in the experiences you create for them as a brand, and then inspiring a genuine bond. I had to re emphasize here and dive deeper. It's a matter of creating continual value for them, while ensuring a mutually beneficial relationship.

Your customers want to feel like you really understand them and their needs, so humanizing their experience with your brand will show customers that you are focused on them and listening to what they have to say.

As a married man, I learned a long time ago, “Happy Wife, Happy Life”. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but be sure to listen, engage, surprise with special treats, make that extra-personalized call to just say hello…I think you get the picture.

The great thing here is, this is a natural way to gain valuable insights into what your customers want, and can be the driving force behind the improvement of your offering and the next big hook. This in turn is paid forward across your customer portfolio and channel partners.

Jeff Bezos makes some great points in his video, Obsessing Over Your Customers...The key here is to create a culture of being customer centric in your company and getting buy-in from management right down to the admin staff.

5) Ahh.. the Esoteric "Employee Empowerment"

If you want your sales team to sell the right products, at the right time, and to the right prospects, then you're going to need to give them access to the right information – wait for it… in as close to real time as possible. This literally means on the fly, without the need to wait for someone outside of him or herself to generate those details.

Your sales team should be empowered and enabled to know the pulse on your products, market, and customer behaviors. They should have access to predictive and suggestive analytics. After all, we are in the age of Big Data.

With these actionable insights, your teams can swiftly and intelligently tackle opportunities and bring in an influx of business that might otherwise be left on the table. I think we all know how painful that is.

Imagine if your team could easily monitor the performance of all the other sales people, increasing their own belief of what is ‘possible'.

Imagine if your team knew beforehand which customers were on the verge of attrition.

Imagine if they knew what actions to take to more successfully mitigate the account attriting.

Imagine if they statistically knew what product/s a customer would purchase, and what the optimal price and quantity to sell these products to that customer were.

My point is, these types of foresights will help their productivity, confidence, and bottom line performance. Its something we’ve witnessed time and time again with platforms like Domo.

Business empowerment through the proper processes, backed by the right technologies is the key here.

Determining the most suitable systems to help guide the actions of your team should be priority #1. Chances are, your competitors are already eyeing up ways to accelerate market growth and leap frog you, so keep and grow your market share by practicing some of these tips and leveraging the force of technology.

Best of luck.