Seven Strategies to Accelerate Revenue Growth

In its most basic form, Sales Transformation is ensuring you have equipped your sales team with the best skills, tools and sales infrastructure to enable successful and profitable sales campaigns.

According to Wikipedia, sales transformation is a form of change management—realigning how assets and people are used to restructure a sales organization. We build on this with a business strategy that focuses on reshaping a sales organization to boost revenue generation.

There are countless resources out there on how to execute a sales transformation initiative, but often the suggestions in these guides are too broad. Sales transformation strategies need to be company specific, not based on a weak universal game plan. At MProve Sales, we tap into our deep sales performance expertise with seven practical actions to direct your sales transformation strategy and results.

The critical need is to transform a sales force from pushing product to building customer loyalty…and turning a nice profit in the process, begins with these seven strategies:

1. Understand your prospects’ and client’s business challenges – Research and understand your customers’ biggest challenges; the state of their industry, company and key stakeholders. Plan how to make them realize that you can help with stories and case studies that prove your value.
2. Ease the customer experience – Align your resources with what matters most to customers. Get the roles, reporting relationships and metrics right. Create a “happy to help culture.” Make yourself easy to do business with.
3. Train and coach for skills which meet customer needs and build loyalty. Assess the skills needed from top to bottom. Then build the skills that are lacking and reinforce the ones that already exist. Coach in the moment to ensure these skills are honed.
4. Implement changes to your CRM solution. Slow and steady wins the race. The most significant issue I have seen with CRM implementations is that the requirement for input from the sales teams is so onerous it becomes a liability, not an asset to the sales team. Minimize the information you require in the system and always be conscious of “is what we’re asking for helping or hindering our sales people in their quest for revenue”. For a strong commitment, you want to get them engaged and part of the process, not be an afterthought.
5. Design compensation to promote behaviors that support your business goals. To raise productivity and control costs, it’s essential that everyone in the sales organization focus on attaining well-defined business goals and growth targets. The compensation system should be designed in a way that directs people to deliver on specific goals, whether that is penetrating new markets, winning new customers, cross-selling to existing customers or improving the profitability of each deal through higher pricing.
6. Equip the back office to allow sales representatives to invest their time in selling. Many solutions providers have a secret weapon—the back office, which can take on most of the lead qualification, proposal development, pricing approval, contract management and billing management—adding back 20% to 30% of more productive time to a sales representative’s day.
7. Sales talent is a major, and missing, driver for a transformation strategy. Talent is a nearly universal challenge for sales organizations, with only 16% of sales leaders saying they are confident that they have the talent they need to succeed in the future. Sales organizations are struggling with who to hire, how to find them and how to develop and support them. CSO Insights 2018

Growing multi-product and solutions businesses over a sustained period will not happen overnight by tweaking the sales model around the edges, but rather by addressing complexity in a comprehensive fashion. Sales organizations need to develop simpler, disciplined sales models that can work in one segment after another. The seven strategies described here will serve to guide executives and sales leaders toward that end, positioning them to generate profitable growth while capitalizing on the changing nature of customer demands.