Are you a short on time sales leader? Do you want to know what to focus on next year? Here’s a quick overview of the three key areas and steps to setting up your team for Sales Success next year.
Step One: Plot out your customers and accounts
Firstly, you need to re-evaluate your current customers and accounts. The KARE principals outlined by Sandler help here – work out which opportunities fall into each category.
- Keep: Do everything possible not to lose them
- Attain: Go and get them
- Recapture: Focus your efforts on winning them back
- Expand: Land and expand opportunity, do more with them
You can organise every opportunity into one of these four principals. The most attractive is likely to be the last one – expand. What are your low low-hanging fruits that represent serious expansion potential? It’s a lot easier to expand in a current customer than acquire a totally new one.
Take the KARE principals and tailor them to your business and operations. Define how to treat each category differently and come up with an overall game plan.
Step Two: Get your team to make key lists
Once your KARE principals have been defined and strategised for every opportunity, ask every member of your team to put in writing answers to the following:
- Who are your top ten customers?
- Who are your top ten customers with a low overall value that can be expanded on next year?
- Who are your top ten prospects at the moment?
- Who are your top ten former customers?
Identify these companies and contacts and create targeting lists ready for outreach.
Step Three: Create a sales playbook
In order to help your sales team achieve their targets, you want to address low productivity and performance by formalising the sales process and behaviours to support growth. The best way to do that is by creating a formal sales playbook, documenting and detailing the best practices to take. No more making it up as you go.
Once created, circulate it amongst the team, get feedback on it, and always improve it. You then need to empower your team to take the playbook and adapt it to support their own behaviours and techniques. The sales playbook should form your training and coaching plan, and you should encourage your best players to mentor underachievers. The whole point of a playbook is to have one, centralised document of systems, processes and best practices to ensure your team operates consistently and all on the same page.
So, there’s our fast overview of the key areas to success in 2021. Implement the above and see your sales team set up to succeed.
