In SBI engagements across the board, a sample list of Commercial Go-to-Market challenges we’ve heard include:
When these issues arise, often, commercial leaders are asked to get into the weeds and get tactical in providing solutions. If you find you have missed your growth targets for this quarter or multiple quarters, we suggest two focus areas for immediate impact:
These tools will help your commercial team get a fast start in 2023.
A consistent approach to opportunity management allows repetition to turn into revenue. You should codify your entire sales process into a sales playbook. This playbook contains clearly defined sales stages with exit criteria corresponding to objectively measurable buyer behavior. Sales playbooks should address everything from lead discipline to the use of tools and the importance of why consistency matters.
Your sales playbook provides a framework for understanding customer needs and moving deals through the sales process with techniques to advance deals quickly. Each sales stage should include responsibilities for all internal roles supporting the selling process and a detailed list of job aids that standardize and support sales motions.
Are your frontline sales managers coaches or "super sellers"? Without a prescribed methodology and regular meetings for sales coaching, many frontline managers will coach to the opportunity at hand. Instead of developing sales competencies in their teams, these managers try to execute on their behalf. And because they can’t effectively manage every opportunity in their territories, they feel overworked and unable to devote time to coaching.
The primary role of the sales coach is to inspire and lead the team to become inherently motivated to learn. The most effective sales managers scale their experience and expertise across their teams with a regularly scheduled cadence of meetings designed to reinforce processes and upskill talent. A coaching playbook enables sales leaders to establish a disciplined framework to manage teams, build on the success that can be repeated, and drive accountability.
By coaching reps to become more effective sellers, win rates will increase, the sales cycle time and attrition will decrease, and ramp-up for new or upskilled reps will be faster. Sales enablement to your managers with a coaching playbook provides a unified approach to the reps and eliminates surprises.
An illustrative coaching methodology - an essential part of a Sales Coaching Playbook and a key building block for a successful sales management cadence.
Without a foundation and documented processes, sellers flounder, and sales managers haphazardly coach sales performance. Sales and sales coaching playbooks will standardize motions across your team, ultimately accelerate pipeline velocity, and define a coaching methodology for front-line managers. While the upfront work may seem daunting, establishing the foundation for your growth journey will typically provide an immediate impact cascading to future quarters.