4 Signs It’s Time to Pivot Your Sales Strategy

sales-analytics

4 Signs It’s Time to Pivot Your Sales Strategy

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Implementing a successful sales strategy is a tough, complicated process. There are many moving parts and all parties have to come together to pull it off. Rarely will you reap the fruits of your labor immediately. But, at what point do you take a step back and say “This isn’t working. Maybe we should try something different?”

Here are a few tell-tale signs that it’s time to pivot your sales strategy:

1. You can’t thoroughly examine past performance.
If this statement is true - brace yourself - because you have set yourself up for failure. If you cannot track the performance of marketing's content, sales’ usage of it, and your customers’ consumption of it, how can you measure its effectiveness and make improvements? You can’t. Furthermore, how can you identify the effective activities of your top reps and translate them into best practices for your B and C-level reps? You can’t.

If you’re not tracking and analyzing performance, you can’t even validate that your strategy has been adopted and executed. And most importantly, without this ability you'll miss the following red flags.

2. Sales performance varies under different managers.
If your sales strategy is working, you should see trends of success across all your sales teams. If you see low or erratic performance isolated to one team, it's typically an indicator that you a team or coaching problem. But if all teams are showing varying levels of success, it's time to reevaluate the material. The current strategy might not be bad practice, but if it’s not supporting overall success, it’s clearly not the best practice.

3. There are very few top performers.
Similar to erratic team performance, an abnormally low number of top performers is another great indicator that it's time to pivot. Good strategy should increase your number of A players and even help your B and C-level reps improve. If you’re experiencing the opposite, something needs to change.

4. Your strategy focuses on completing tasks rather than developing skills.
Think about the activities that you press your reps do more of. If this list consists of administrative work, CRM data entry, or requires a lot of self-educating, it's time to modernize your strategy. Your sales reps were hired for their skill, so they should be using and developing it. The more time they spend on other activities, the less time they have to focus on selling. Not to say these tasks are not important! They are critical for tracking, analytics and reporting. But in the age of AI, business intelligence, and automation, there are solutions that will completely relieve your reps from the burden of these administrative tasks. Find a tool that can automate your reps’ workflow, so you can maximize their efficiency and productivity and keep them focused on selling.

To learn more about our software solution that can help you execute your sales strategy, contact us to today or request a demo!

By Accent Technologies

4th May 2018