As the beneficiaries of your marketing efforts, the sales team takes over once prospects have been nurtured and advanced to meet your qualifying criteria.
The sales organization, working together with the marketing and strategic teams, should focus on defining the best opportunities and creating a process that helps achieve the company's growth goals. Sales should consider strategies for:
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- Increasing penetration in existing clients and markets
- Diversifying your sales approach
- New customer opportunities
Increased Market Opportunities
Evaluate your current opportunities. While not a revolutionary strategy, it's not immediately considered when looking to move towards growth. And it should be.
We tend to give up too quickly on our existing pipelines. Sales teams need a deep understanding of their buyer personas and use them to identify their best opportunities within the current pipeline. Depending on the product or service and the legal market segment served, the buying process can be lengthy and additional influencers may be brought in.
Take a long hard look at the opportunities you and your team pursued over the last 12-18 months, and evaluate what worked and what did not. Then, adjust your sales process and projections to make sure they align with your growth goals
When you consider increasing penetration in existing markets, ensure your sales team:
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- Clearly understands your growth goals and your buyer personas
- Has a path to succeed
- Works hand-in-hand with customer success
Updated Strategies & Processes
Have your sales strategies and processes evolved with the market?
Analyze the data stored in your CRM to evaluate your efforts. CMRs are not just for convenient access to contact records, note-taking, and task management; they are a robust data store. Use your CRM to help analyze what is working and what can be improved or abandoned.
With so many options and tactics available to your business today, it can be overwhelming to evaluate and upgrade your sales strategies. Working with your sales team to develop and refine your sales processes reduces doubt and empowers them.
Do you have an inbound or outbound sales strategy or a combination of both? Are you interacting with leads mainly through email, calls, social media, or face-to-face? With so many options, why not create a strategy specifically tailored to your customer's needs.
Diversifying your sales approach allows you to meet each unique lead where they are most comfortable and ready to interact with you.
Once you understand your updated sales strategy, boil it down to the details.
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- How is your sales team positioned for success?
- Who's providing them with qualified leads?
- How will you measure successs
Alignment
Your sales team is on the front lines of product feedback. They are constantly bombarded with comments such as "I'd buy your product if it only did this..." or "If you add in this feature, I can get my boss on board..." These "if only this" are objections! Sales should always focus on the product you can deliver today.
Feedback from sales often leads to the 'shiny penny syndrome' and causes development to significantly detour from its roadmap. Those costly detours have taken down more than one company.
From a sales perspective, growth means communicating with marketing and working together to:
- Define and receive more Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs)
- Develop the content your prospects want to consume
- Synchronize actionable feedback
Once sales and marketing are aligned, and leadership has shared its growth goals, it is time for your sales organization to set individual and team goals. Your sales team needs to buy in and believe the growth plan is achievable, so break it down for them. Use the metrics from your CRM to determine:
- Your most qualified and most likely prospects
- How many touches and in what sequence delivers the best results
- Create an environment where individuals and the team succeed together
Without Sales, there is no growth, and the inter-relationships between marketing, customer success, and leadership are undeniable. Enabling the sales team to be successful will lead to a successful growth strategy.
