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Winning business - Growing Accounts - Renewing Contracts
Winning Business
How Aligned Are Your Marketing and Sales Teams?
May 2025: For many organisations marketing and sales fail to properly integrate their thinking and their activities.
One of my favourite books, ‘The Solution-Centric Organization’ by Keith Eades and Robert Kear, sets out a ‘Sales Performance Improvement Framework’ for how marketing and sales should work together. Although the book is almost 20 years old, many companies still fail to connect the dots.
The value messaging, carefully crafted by marketing, often gets ignored by front-line sales and the business strategy stalls. If you are struggling to communicate your messaging to the sales teams, why not call WGR to talk through options. Use the Calendly link below to set up a short call.
Growing accounts
Sales Playbooks have been around for decades but do they add value?
January 2025: There is evidence that sales playbooks make a difference; but the benefits for many firms are often marginal.
The primary cause is poor execution. Too often it is assumed that salespeople will read, understand and apply the knowledge from the playbook.
Don’t assume! Without a roll-out that includes ‘activation’ sessions to check understanding, start developing conversation openers and role-playing to apply the newly acquired knowledge, you are probably wasting your time with playbooks.
Contact us for a chat on how sales managers can leverage existing sales playbooks to achieve success in 2025
Renewing CONTRACTS
The challenges of sales planning
January 2025: Sales professionals are often reluctant planners, relying on their manager, marketing and their experience to know what they should be doing at any point in time.
However, they significantly increase the risk of missing opportunities, ignoring new risks and missing targets if they fail to plan properly.
What is proper planning? It will be different for each sales team, but at a minimum, there needs to be some thought and process around prioritization of activities to align to company goals and avoid wasting time talking to the wrong prospects and wrong target personas.
Contact us and arrange a short meeting to understand how the sales planning can help maximize revenue and individual performance.
Do You Have A Sales Capacity Deficit?
The combination of attrition, open headcount, new sellers and unfilled growth headcount is affecting sales performance.
An SBI report estimated that companies faced a sales capacity deficit of over 50% in 2022. Nothing has changed in the past couple of years. This is still an issue.
Recruiting superstars is not an option for most, so many need to find other was of reducing any deficit.
Here are some thoughts:
– the cost of uncovered quota – empty roles – means that you are better off hiring ‘average’ sellers now and developing their competencies.
– Don’t fire salespeople, new or tenured, without making a real effort to develop their competencies. Make sure sales managers are fulfilling their role as leaders and coaches.
– Make sure your onboarding develops the competencies of sellers to the necessary level, and is not just a rapid tick-box exercise designed to satisfy an arbitrary metric for onboarding.
Sometimes you need to check in with your managers and teams and assess their motivation.
If you are looking for assessments that go beyond standard sales behaviors, consider those from Transform Performance International.
Their books, “The Leader’s Secret Code” and “The Salesperson’s Secret Code” provide great insight into the beliefs and values of high performers.
Check it out at: www.transformperformance.com
Arrange a meeting to discuss how this all works!