Strategy Alone is Just An Idea

“High performing Sales teams pair strategy with process and metrics”

You might have the correct prospects, products, and sales playbooks, but without the proper process and underlying metrics to inspect each step, we’ve seen teams fail to achieve high-performing levels that generate the volume of qualified leads required to hit quotas.

Thorough inspection of your prescriptive activity ensures that the expectations of your strategy are being met and, if not, it informs any adjustments needed to be made. Inspection must be consistent from both a timing & process perspective – we prefer daily cadences within our Sales win-rooms that we utilize to compile feedback & insights that drive activity against strategy.

A daily cadence ensures progress and prevents surprises.

Slow progress is often due to lack of inspection and/or communication among working team members and stakeholders.

Example – a client’s weekly sales performance reviews were too high-level, solely focused on hitting activity metrics and not inspecting why the numbers were what they were, gathering daily insights related to prescriptive activity and iterating the approach to improve overall performance. Understanding WHY.
Key learning – the weekly reviews were built around activity, not performance metrics, such as, did you send a 1,000 emails and make 500 calls this week? It becomes a check-the-box routine & habit rather than a feedback channel & evergreen process improvement mechanism to act on insights, fast.

Surprises are often due to lack of foresight resulting in reactive decision-making, most likely caused by miscommunication and/or poor planning with mismanaged execution.

Example – a client’s $30M growth strategy dissolved completely in-year to a $10M gap-closure plan due to lack of consistent inspection against performance targets. The lack of inspection & prescriptive activity resulted in significant decrease in volume going undiscovered due to top line increases driven by price.
Key learning – Even “good” numbers require inspection. Lower volumes would’ve indicated losing share to competitors since the overall market was not shrinking, which would’ve allowed for more timely & strategic adjustments.

To have daily effective win-rooms, we start with a laser focus on the process and what the metrics are telling us: which touchpoint is most effective at creating contact, which email headline converts the highest, which titles are we most successful at engaging with, and so on. Win-rooms bring all working team members together, under one primary stakeholder, to analyze key learnings in a consistent manner and implement rapid-fire adjustments when necessary. Rinse and repeat. That analysis can drive minor and/or major changes in the overall strategy, or more simply, any modifications needed to the sales process.

Let’s Get To Work

Each initiative can be different, but in general, implement just half of these metrics below to inspect your sales campaigns and you should expect improved results