COVID-19 has had drastic effects on many companies unequipped for a radical shift in how customers do business.  The good news is, there is still money to be made, and those able to pivot in new directions can still achieve sales success. Sales leaders are advised to follow the five C’s of COVID-19 in order to effectively lead their teams, retain and gain customers, and reach their goals in unprecedented times. 

Velocity, Speed.  Take any object and make it go faster and it will have more force.  Take any Sales Team and make it go faster and you will sell more.

Finding new clients is essential to growing your business, so finding them must be a high priority.  Market coverage models outline the strategy for how sales people can sell to as many good prospects as possible. Most sales people do a poor job of maximizing their territories, so don’t leave it all up to them. Well done market coverage strategies and models help find, target, convert and report on the best, most profitable prospects. 

When you build a new product or service you’ll have to decide what value you’re going to bring to your customer, what problem you’ll solve, and what that should be worth. As you bring that product to market, you will create value propositions that define your position across product planning, marketing messaging, and sales messaging. This simple framework helps to keep the product and messaging aligned, clear, and on track.

A sales leader shared his frustrations during a recent meeting.  “Our metrics are all on track,” he said.  “We made a huge push last year and we’ve finally gotten the reps to enter data into the CRM consistently.  We created a bunch of dashboards, and these all show the reps are consistently meeting their targets for phone calls placed, emails sent, and meetings conducted.  Our sales funnels look stronger than ever, and yet, a full year later, we’re not seeing any noticeable sales increase over prior periods.”    

In this fourth and final installment in our series on forecast accuracy, we’ll examine the forecast process itself to identify ways in which that process can foster - or hinder - forecast accuracy.   

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we discussed the importance of getting to know your client base from a variety of perspectives and using that knowledge to design a sales process that is aligned to their buying process.  In this part, we’ll discuss how to set-up your sales information system in a way that promotes forecast accuracy.

In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of getting to know your client base.  Factors such as the criticality of your product to their success, the buyer’s attitude toward sales and salespeople, the financial and personal risks they face both from buying and NOT buying your product and the way in which they want to buy all provide data points that should inform the sales process you deploy.   In this part, we’ll discuss how to avoid the pitfalls we see in many sales processes and help you design a sales process that appropriately leverages what you know about your client base.

As we enter the second quarter of 2019, many companies on calendar fiscal years are asking their sales departments for revenue forecasts that reach out to the end of the year. In this four-part series, we’ll provide suggestions on how to improve the accuracy of revenue forecasts and the issues that can influence it.

I have been truly humbled in my career, by working with and for amazing sales leaders. Even today in my sales consulting firm, I am constantly amazed at how these amazing individuals exhibit these behaviors and assets. I have not included in this blog assets like honesty, values, proven skills, trust, leadership and communication — I will leave these for another time.