5 Keys to Becoming a Sales First Company

Posted by Chris Tratar on Jul 15, 2014 9:30:00 AM

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Chris_Tratar_SAVO_140By Chris Tratar, vice president of product marketing, SAVO

I know what you are thinking. We don’t want to become a sales first company, we are a customer first company. Being a customer first company is absolutely the right goal; however, in order to truly be a customer first company, you must initially become a sales first company. Becoming a sales first company is all about aligning everyone in your organization to support your sales team because they are the face of your brand and the person your customers turn to first to understand how your products and services can help them solve their toughest business challenges.

Becoming a sales first company is all about aligning marketing, sales, sales operations, sales enablement and your product teams around driving sales productivity. At SAVO, we define sales productivity as the ability to help your sales team efficiently prepare for sales calls, effectively execute sales campaigns, and create high impact engagement with their prospects and customers.

Based on conversations with our customers and some of the foremost leaders in sales enablement and productivity, here are five key steps to becoming a sales first company:

1) Gain alignment at senior executive levels on your go-to-market strategy and how your sales organization, processes or sales motions support it. Building a sales organization for a high volume, low price transactional type of sale is very different from a go-to-market strategy that focuses on cross-selling and up-selling your products to a small, strategic set of large accounts. Not only will your sales organization have to be structured correctly, but your sales enablement, training, coaching, content strategy and processes will also have to be aligned in order to drive real sales productivity.

2) Appoint a senior level executive that will focus entirely on driving sales enablement and productivity. In many cases, companies think of sales operations as the body that focuses entirely on driving and ensuring sales enablement and productivity, but really they’re responsible for CRM systems and perhaps making a few training investments. Sales operations is only a piece of the puzzle. A senior sales enablement leader is responsible for focusing on pulling together a common strategy that incorporates marketing/solution content, sales training and coaching, sales processes and methodologies and the right sales enablement technology to drive higher sales productivity. To ensure sales productivity and more satisfied customers, organizations need to make sure they have senior-level focused leadership. Leading organizations today are catching on to this and we are seeing more and more companies adding this role.

3) Identify critical areas of misalignment in your organization, understand which ones are the biggest drains to sales productivity and find ways to drive alignment. Misalignment has been plaguing marketing and sales teams for decades. In order to fix the alignment, you must start by identifying the greatest gaps. For example, are your sales reps spending 30-40 percent of their time on non-value-added sales activities such as creating PowerPoint presentations or searching for content in several different systems? Are they able to consistently follow a sales process as they go through an opportunity? Do they have the right tools to drive effective, compelling conversations anytime, anywhere, from lead to proposal? Are they able to easily complete all of their daily activities with marketing approved content? There are solutions readily available today to help companies overcome these gaps, but first, they must be identified.

4) Evaluate your existing sales, marketing and product related processes and how they are supported by technology to drive efficiency and consistency. The most common thing we see today is that there are a lot of different tools out there, and often, companies have them all. Organizations may be investing in sales training and various sales methodologies, but the technology systems they have in place may not come together to support them. They use band-aid solutions like their CRM system or a social collaboration tool or a content management portal. This patchwork of solutions may solve point problems, but at the end of the day, all these technologies fall short of directly supporting the underlying process or methodology. Instead, companies should look to implement a scalable, flexible solution that helps to reinforce sales training and methodologies while incorporating data and content from other marketing and sales technology solutions.

5) Build a long-term roadmap of key areas of misalignment that drain sales productivity and systematically pick them off one by one. Creating random acts of sales enablement or focusing on the biggest immediate pain point happens often today, however, forward thinking organizations take a longer view of driving sales productivity through better sales enablement. Leaders in sales enablement understand the big picture and prioritize a series of initiatives in a long-term sales enablement roadmap that takes into account sales productivity impact, available resources, organizational appetite and many other factors. Then, they begin to incrementally improve their sales productivity by tackling each initiative, one at a time.

Organizations that focus on improving these five key areas to become a sales first company will find they are more successful in maintaining solid customer relationships and driving greater revenue than if they make customers their only priority.

For additional information, watch this live interview between Dan McDade and Chris Tratar: http://blog.pointclear.com/blog/bid/205495/PowerViews-with-Chris-Tratar-Execs-Need-to-Support-Sales-First-Culture.


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Topics: Marketing & Sales Alignment, Sales Process


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