Driving sales growth

Leadership Capital Index can be defined as the correlation between market value of an organization and the quality of leadership. What determines this, is the result of organisation’s strategic engagement with customers by way of sales enablement.

I have discovered that the solution to today’s challenging business fortunes is that, leaders should unleash human capability in the area of sales enablement. Organisations should chart a new way forward by developing a sales enablement strategy that drives sales productivity and growth, marketing effectiveness and phenomenal revenue growth.

Dwindling revenue returns have revealed that conventional business strategy that fixes budgets or revenue target expectations annually are not matching audacious goals. We need regular interventions to capture the flow of dynamic patterns created by different actors, new opportunities and new threats. Revenue targets must keep moving to fully accommodate rejuvenated efforts in driving prospecting, sales funnel and customer journey.

Today’s trajectory of business is indeed, a combination of emergent strategies driven by among other things, incremental change, radical change and even, disruptive change.

Organizations need a systemic approach in order to take full advantage of the unfolding trend of systemic agility. Today, we must take appropriate actions in response to the dictates of the marketplace. It should be “inside out” and “outside-in” approaches. Skills and capabilities must be maximally utilized in our sales enablement efforts.

Let me explain the need for us to appropriately track (by measuring) audacious sales enhancement and enablement efforts. There are two key indicators in this strategy namely: Lagging Indicators and Leading Indicators. Lagging indicators are the annual budgets (expectations) and the total number of sequences and engagements. That is, cumulative total number of sales efforts (in all remnifications). Organisations usually check this sequence of activities weekly, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly and annually. But definitely, we should not wait for 12 months to get the numbers and work on them. We need to track (for effectiveness and improved revenue), strategic selling and needs satisfaction, consultative value-based selling approaches, personality selling as well as sales methodologies, platforms and tools, and also B2B niches.

What organisations need to rapidly lift growth goals, growth targets and growth outcomes are LEADING INDICATORS. Things that we can view in the early stage of the sales funnel and immediately inspect, influence or coach (train etc.). Let me give some examples of leading indicators that impact sales and productivity. They include: effectiveness in qualifying sales opportunities (leads); how productive are sales meetings and other informal training-oriented engagements; how many sequences are being executed and turned to revenue inflows.

Leading indicators enable organizations provide coaching, training and immediate useful engagements. Follow-ups can be tracked and guidance on stage by stage conversion provided. Data and other metrics can be creatively utilized to enhance implementation effectiveness. These indicators greatly assist frontline sales people, promotes customer success and improve presentations as well as content sharing.

As I mentioned earlier, organisations should adopt the proactive, agile “Patterns of Strategy Approach” and not be bogged down by the conventional annual “too late” target outcome approach. Patterns strategy focuses on the dynamics of strategic situations for agile decision-making. It measures sets of maneuvers and enables a systemic agility approach to audacious sales enablement.

Leaders must from time-to-time, know what is working and what is not working. In addition, we want to continuously rev up enablement skills and competencies, effective execution strategy and tactics, robust content and regular training, creativity at rolling out sales programmes and desirable revenue outcomes.

A way to elevate standard of result-oriented execution consists of effectively using the following: Activity Metrics, Conversion Metrics, Outcome Metrics and Productivity Metrics. The more we can understand and achieve access to information around activities and conversion metrics, the bigger impact we will achieve in driving the needed revenue.

Sales enablement processes must be understood, monitored and measured. These processes include: lead, prospects and sales processes; buyer journeys and customer success (for loyalty); customer needs (to promote customer experience); renewals, attainment of targets and alignment with inflows.

Leaders must regularly align with teams to get feedbacks and directly (and indirectly) ensure outcomes and impact. Teams must be strategic and outcome-focused. Salespeople must be excellent and compelling communicators as well as consensus builders. There must be enablement training and retraining (formal and informal). Sales enablement meetings must not just be sales meetings but also cross-functional meetings.

Salespeople on the frontline must imbibe the following habits in their engagements with customers (and prospects). They must take prospects and customers “outside the box” and showcase the organisation’s differentiating “battle cards”. Planning and excellent time management, are very important. You must proffer value-adding solutions. Do not waste time on prospects that are proving difficult to qualify. Build value always and understand the needs of the customer. Your skills and resources must always be focused on selling products or services.

Let me conclude by stating the fact that the identity of an organisation is the impression employees create in the mind of the customer. We build our market value through daily customer touchpoints. Every employee is, therefore, a sales enabler and must act as one always.

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