Want to be Best-in-Class? Rethink Your 2016 Sales Objectives

sales

Want to be Best-in-Class? Rethink Your 2016 Sales Objectives

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If you ask a group of sales managers what their sales goals for 2016 are, you’re most likely going to hear the same responses multiple times: Improve quota attainment, increase sales rep productivity, expand lead quality and quantity, grow revenue, etc.

However, when you ask about their plans for achieving those sales goals, the responses are going to be a lot more varied. Everybody has an idea of the best way to achieve sales goals, ranging from acquisitions to sales training to strategies for better buyer engagement.

Instead of adding our own recommendations to the pile, we’re going to take a different approach. Here are the sales management objectives that have proven to work for Best-in-Class companies in 2015, according to research company Aberdeen:

 

Sales Performance Management chart

 

According to Aberdeen’s research report Sales Performance Management 2016: How the Best-in-Class Evolve Success, Best-in-Class companies are more likely than all other companies to pursue technologies that help achieve the following sales management objectives:

 

1. Understanding buyers’ business challenges

Insight into your buyers’ needs and challenges can be a game changer in B2B sales. To effectively communicate value, your reps need to understand how exactly your products or services relate to your buyers’ environments. For buyers, this is a big differentiator between two competing companies.

 

2. Personalizing sales conversations

Which email is going to be more effective: a generic blast campaign or a personalized message that directly addresses the challenges that buyer is facing? More than just emails, best-in-class companies pursue technologies that allow sales reps to easily personalize presentations, proposals, movies and more for individual buyers. These personalized communications significantly increase buyer engagement, leading to higher win rates.

 

3. Providing reps w/ marketing tools to develop, send and track responses

The ability to quickly develop sales resources, distribute them effectively and track how buyers are responding has historically been the weak link for sales departments. Either sales reps have relied on marketing to create sales resources (a time-consuming and inefficient approach), or they have settled for creating their own low quality content.

Best-in-class companies choose a third option: using technology to give reps an easy way to quickly create personalized, branded and approved materials to send to buyers.

 

4. Substituting guesswork with analytics to prove best sales practices

The largest gap between best-in-class objectives and laggard company objectives lies in analytics. Sales managers at best-in-class companies are far more likely to leverage analytics to provide a data-driven, reliable approach to sales execution.

Using analytics, companies are able to identify A seller behaviors and replicate those activities in their B and C sellers, raising rep productivity and sales effectiveness across the board.

 

5. Onboarding, training and retaining sellers

Companies spend a lot of money on onboarding and training, so it makes perfect sense to use technology to streamline the onboarding process, ramp up sales reps faster and retain employees longer. Getting your reps to full productivity faster and keeping them with your company directly correlates to higher revenue for your company.

 

6. Providing mobile access to mission-critical sales data/content

The world has gone mobile, and best-in-class companies haven’t gotten left behind. In order to ensure your sales reps are 100% effective 100% of the time, they need the ability to quickly and easily access all of the tools and information that enable them to sell. From CRM data to sales presentations to email templates—the easier it is to access through mobile, the more likely your reps will use it.

 

 

How do I achieve these sales management objectives?

Through sales enablement. Everything from buyer activity tracking to sales training reinforcement to mobile apps can be achieved through sales enablement software. Make 2016 the year that your company’s sales process gets on track for stronger sales execution and higher win rates.

 

If you’d like to learn how sales enablement can help with your company’s unique sales objectives, give one of our sales enablement consultants a call.

By Accent Technologies

31st December 2015