By Our Content Partner, The Sales Collective
2023 is now upon us! Is your business positioned to win, or are you relying on hope as your strategy to increase revenue?
We’ve been working closely with many CEOs and founders to support their growth goals for 2023, and we’ve noticed some recurring themes in our conversations. There’s a palpable fear that an oncoming recession will significantly reduce company valuations and negatively impact revenues. Areas like Lifetime Customer Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), margins, and burn rates are of particular concern.
To address these real concerns, companies are focusing on three key areas to strengthen their revenue strategy. These consist of evaluating the current state of the business in terms of people, processes, and technology. By taking a proactive approach vs. a reactive approach, companies can mitigate their risks and better position themselves for success.
1. Sales Success Starts With Your People
Steve Jobs said, “A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.” So, when it comes to your people, ask yourself several questions. “Do we have A players?” If not, ask yourself, “How do we hire A players or level up our B players to A players?” To do this properly, you need to establish a baseline and a definition of an A player in your organization.
The most effective way to accomplish this is to utilize a sales-specific, predictively valid assessment like The Sales DNA Test. Generic personality-based or behavioral assessments will NOT achieve this goal and will only exacerbate assumptions based on competencies that have not been proven to lead to sales success.
Another strategy is to define the core competencies essential for success in each role of your sales organization and couple that with a 9-box matrix. Then objectively rate your current talent in these areas. The matrix will help you identify the most critical areas for improvement and help you decide if you have the right people in place, if you need to provide more training, or if you should consider hiring new talent.
2. Perfecting Your Sales Process
A recent study showed that companies without a documented, well-defined sales process lose 18% of top-line revenue year-over-year! Other than being told, “go sell more stuff,” companies whose sales teams have no roadmap to follow have salespeople who give away margin, discount more frequently to make sales, allow more contract concessions, and have lower win rates.
The first and most crucial step in building a well-defined sales process your sales team can follow consistently is to have all sales stages documented with defined actions, criteria, and success metrics. The next step is to build criteria to determine the health of your pipeline from the prospecting stage to a closed deal. There are quite a few steps between receiving a lead and converting a prospect into a client, and if you don’t know what needs to happen at each stage and what milestones need to be achieved, how can you accurately forecast and predict outcomes?
If you can’t identify the gaps causing revenues to stagnate, you can’t fix them. Documenting the sales process from beginning to end and creating objective ways to analyze both active and stalled deals is one of the biggest challenges companies continue to struggle with. Identifying, addressing, and fixing this crucial component of driving revenue will ultimately determine your valuation, ability to scale, and whether your business is poised for sustained, scalable growth. Improving these areas will have the most significant impact on LTV & CAC.
3. Streamline Your Sales Process With Technology
Lastly, have you developed a technology stack that can automate and accelerate results, create prospecting efficiency, and provide you with the data you need to make your sales team as productive as they can be?
A technology stack (often called a tech stack) is a set of technology tools used by companies to support their business operations and processes. In the context of sales, a tech stack may include tools that automate daily tasks related to prospecting, like emailing and scheduling. It may also include tools like conversational AI that will analyze calls to help provide you with valuable data and powerful insights about your salespeople and in which areas they need more coaching, training, and development.
These tools help sales teams streamline workflows and make more informed decisions, increasing efficiency and effectiveness. When properly implemented, a tech stack ensures that small sales teams can achieve the same productivity level as larger teams.
Final Thoughts
As a new year begins, elite CEOs and founders are focusing on these three key areas to prepare their businesses for success: people, sales process, and technology. This includes evaluating and improving the quality of their current sales talent, defining and documenting their sales process, and implementing a tech stack that automates tasks and provides data for better decision-making.
In the coming weeks and months, we’ll share more in-depth strategies and best practices relating to this important and relevant topic in today’s marketplace. Our goal is to provide insight from fellow leaders and organizations across multiple industries that are currently having success driving revenue in this ever-changing economic climate.
At The Sales Collective, our team of experts has a wealth of knowledge and decades of experience helping companies of all types and sizes who want to drive more revenue by revamping, revitalizing, or reimagining their entire sales operation from top to bottom. If you’d like more information, please visit us at: TheSalesCollective.com.
