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8 Ways to Jumpstart Your Sales Execution Today
One of the most lucrative ways to improve your business survivability is through boosting your sales team's effectiveness — yet many companies choose to focus on aspects of the business-like product velocity or customer support costs rather than dialling in on their sales execution. Truth is, your sales team when working at maximum efficiency, it brings in greater amount of revenue than all of your other teams combined.
What is Sales Execution?
Sales execution is the sum of the activities and processes that a team puts in place to guide a lead through the sales funnel. Some of these activities are done by marketing teams through lead generation or by other customer-facing groups in sending along potential prospects from their inbox.
When looked at holistically, sales execution includes everything leading up to the close of a sale. That can mean anything from your customer experience to the way that your sales team generates interest to your sales funnel.
Sales execution is inherently customer-centric — based on zeroing in on your customer's needs, determining focused solutions, and putting structures and processes in place to consistently deliver on them.
Ways to Improve Sales Execution
- Identify your target markets.
- Create a plan.
- Define the stages in your sales pipeline.
- Build up your pipeline.
- Automate processes to free up your sales team.
- Iterate on your sales process.
- Review your progress with sales scorecards.
- Align your teams.
Knowing what sales execution is might be half the battle, but working towards it takes time and effort. Whether you’re just getting your sales team off the ground or already have a well-oiled sales machine, there are always aspects of sales execution that can be revisited and tightened up. Here are 8 methods for boosting sales execution.
1. Identify your target markets.
Many companies wind up trying to sell to too many audiences, and that can be a tough mistake to make. When you take that sort of scattershot approach to targeting, you might end up being a "jack of all trades, master of none." You're much better off identifying a few key target markets that you would like to sell to and focusing on their needs and interests.
For instance, young companies assume that the more people they market to, the better. However, suppose a start-up’s product is best suited for smaller businesses, but it’s spending money on advertising to businesses of all sizes.
In that case, even if it sells to larger companies, those companies are likely to end up unsatisfied because the product isn’t a great fit. Instead of boosting your numbers upfront and paying with subsequent unsatisfaction, identify your markets from the start — and focus your selling, time, and resources on them.
2. Create a plan
After identifying the markets that your product is best suited for, it’s time to create a plan to reach them. There are a few steps for creating a plan:
- Develop goals for your team as well as goals at an organizational level.
- Identify your target audience and define how you will reach them.
- Maintain an excellent sales team that feels motivated and excited by their work.
- Work with marketing to create a demand generation plan.
- Measure performance and coach team members towards goals.
- Track sales activities and rectify bottlenecks.
- Each of these helps create a cohesive, solid plan for how your team will succeed in their movement towards sales execution.
3. Define the stages in your sales pipeline
People outside of sales often assume the field is straightforward — you find a customer and sell to them, right? Wrong. Sales is a complex dance of outreach, waiting, and well-timed pressure on the customer to ensure prompt closing. One of the best ways to ensure that leads move through your funnel as quickly as possible is to define clear actions in your 12 steps sales cycle.
Every company will have different stages, depending on their product and the type of customer that they have. For instance, a company that primarily sells enterprise software may have a significant number of more detailed stages in its sales pipeline. In contrast, a smaller company may be fine with something as simple as:
Awareness — When the buyer realizes that they have a problem they need to solve
Consideration — When the buyer defines their pain point, creates a list of their needs, and evaluates their options
Decision — When the buyer is in the final stages of the process and assessing a few competitors
By identifying these stages, your team can create steps within your 12 steps sales cycle to address the particular needs of your prospects at each phase.
4. Build up your pipeline.
The best thing that you can do for your team’s sales execution is give them something to execute on. Without leads and prospects to work with, your sales team can’t meet their sales goals.
There are tons of ways to build up your pipeline, including:
- Having your sales team actively prospect on social media like LinkedIn
- Working on your inbound marketing content and collect leads via your visitors
- Adding tools to your stack to allow your content and site to generate leads passively
- Dropping dead leads quickly, and constantly assessing your evaluation process for leads
- Generating automated call lists for your sales team
- Keeping your sales cycle short.
When you have a well-fed pipeline, your sales team will always have leads and prospects to engage with.
5. Automate processes to free up your sales team.
Automate as many steps in your process as possible to free up your sales team to do the hard work of direct selling. For instance, you can automate data entry and prospecting emails. By utilizing tools with analytics built-in, like our upcoming Roamie application to track your sales force performance, you can also choose to trigger specific emails or outreach based on your prospects’ behaviours.
Automation frees up your sales team from having to watch analytics and provides an excellent experience for your prospects. It also serves to move them through the sales cycle quickly and easily.
6. Iterate on your processes.
As with every other aspect of your business, you shouldn't set your sales execution strategies in stone. Take every opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of your plan and if it's still serving your team. There’s no need to maintain old habits that are no longer working to improve your sales velocity.
Some teams evaluate processes, automation, and triggers every quarter. Some do it more frequently. Identify what the appropriate review period is for your team, and put it in place. Remember, this can always change and can be moved to be more or less frequent as needed.
7. Review your progress with sales Roamie.
Your sales team members are critical components of your sales execution. If they’re not performing to the best of their abilities, your team will not be executing as well as it could be.
Sales Roamie is a great way to efficiently and comprehensively evaluate each of your team members or yourself. Identify whether you’d like to do a mix of manager-executed — or if you’d like to mix in peer review through Roamie, and then develop a process to ensure that they are regularly happening. Roamie help your sales team continue improving their strategies and serve as quality control.
8. Align your teams
As I mentioned earlier, it’s not just your sales team that contributes to sales execution. Your marketing and customer-facing teams also have a significant impact on how many deals your team can close.
Take the time to align your marketing efforts with the types of leads and prospects you’d like to attract. Beyond that, work directly with your customer-facing teams to ensure that the appropriate expectations are set for treating leads at certain stages in the sales funnel. When everyone works together to provide the best possible experience for your leads, they’ll be banging down the door to buy your product.
Sales execution isn’t rocket science.
Your team is probably already doing some — if not all — of these things. That said, the best way to boost your sales execution is to continue to pay attention to the details of each of these practices. Even if you’ve done an excellent job historically, there’s always room to improve.
Start by identifying who you’d like to sell to, and then create a plan to make it happen. From there, identify the different stages that your ideal buyer needs to go through to execute a sale. Work to build up your pipeline so that your sales team has something to work with, and then automate repeated simple tasks to free up their time.
It’s essential to constantly evaluate your efficiency and iterate on your processes to be better. It’s a whole team affair, so ensure that everyone is on the same page, and you’ll be moving fast with sales execution in no time.
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