The CEO’s Guide to a Fast Start for Sales in 2024

With the turn of the calendar year, CEOs and their go-to-market teams stand at a crossroads that presents both unique challenges and opportunities.

The aftermath of Q4 typically creates an intermission period where organizations recalibrate their execution of go-to-market (GTM) strategies—and depending on how well things go, this could make or break their commercial momentum for the rest of the year.

Based on my experiences with SBI clients, I’ve put together a quick guide on seven critical areas for CEOs to focus on to enable their teams to realize a fast start to 2024.

Commercial Skills: Put talent with the right skills in the right roles.

A successful year starts with having the right talent. While SBI’s research has shown a decline in seller attrition rates, from 27% in early 2022 to 13% projected for 2024, maintaining seller effectiveness remains a concern. Use the start of the year to evaluate and realign seller skills to current and future organizational needs, ensuring that each person has the best skills for their roles.

Early-year imperatives:

• Critically evaluate individual seller competencies; potentially transition out lower-potential sellers as needed.
• Review and inventory changes in role expectations from reorganizations.

Time Spend: Define what sellers should and should not be doing.

Effective time management is critical to early-year productivity. Companies often neglect to provide clear expectations on how sellers should prioritize their efforts, especially with regards to how much time they spend in the market.

Early-year imperatives:

• Set clear guidelines on how sellers should spend their time through kickoffs, coaching, and playbooks.
• Emphasize the importance of deal planning and understanding the customer to redirect seller efforts towards high-impact tasks.

Sales Process: The importance of providing more structure and clarity.

Companies can achieve significant early-year momentum by having an adaptable, customer-centric sales process. Evaluate and update the process based on current market conditions and customer behaviors. Your sales process is most effective when it aligns with buyer needs.

Early-year imperatives:

• Instill a clear understanding of the sales process and buyer journey among your commercial teams.
• Implement a regular cadence to review and revise the sales process in line with market conditions.

Commercial Team Enablement: Consider a more holistic approach.

Enablement doesn’t stop at just events and training. Enablement is most effective when it is treated as a comprehensive program, giving sales teams continuous access to tools, resources, and training for them to help them bring out their potential.

Early-year imperatives:

• Curate enablement materials and prompts for post-sales kick-off reinforcement.
• Balance live training events with on-demand enablement resources for a productive year.

Coaching: Get sales managers focused on the right skills and approach.

Front-line sales managers are crucial to scaling sales efforts through effective coaching. Invest in training them to drive significant improvement in overall seller productivity.

Early-year imperatives:

• Strengthen sales managers’ coaching skills to help teams shorten deal cycle times.
• Encourage managers to focus on tailoring messaging to the buyer’s unique data and buying process.

Demand Generation: Accelerate pipeline replenishment.

A healthy pipeline is crucial for a fast start to the year. Prioritize stimulating and capturing latent demand through targeted outbound messaging, events, and channel marketing.

Early-year imperatives:

• Take a two-track approach to demand generation; stimulate latent demand and restart top-of-funnel efforts.
• Emphasize targeting and personalization to rapidly advance leads down the funnel.

RevTech Tools: Improve the utilization of your tech investments.

RevTech tools should complement the sales process, not complicate it. Make the most of these tools by evaluating their current usage and ensuring data integrity.

Early-year imperatives:

• Evaluate tech stack utilization and focus on enhancing what you already have.
• Tidy up underlying data and process for the continued reliability of your RevTech tools.

To sum things up, CEOs would be well-positioned to facilitate a fast start to 2024 by simply going back to the basics. Optimizing factors like talent, time spend, process, enablement, coaching, demand generation, and RevTech utilization can really add up in terms of commercial productivity. Follow these steps to see productivity returns that will put your organization back on track to meeting your growth targets.

I wrote another version of this article that was published by Forbes. Click here to read the article now.