Best Practice in Sales and Marketing: 4 Signs of Sales Success

April 30, 2016

by Mark Donnolo, Managing Partner, SalesGlobe

Mark Donnolo, founder of the sales effectiveness consultancy, SalesGlobe, has identified the 4 signs of sales success. Sales leaders are continuously updating their sales strategies in anticipation of new goals and objectives, but coincidentally, their best intentions become missed opportunities. Mark offers the following signs of sales success.

You understand the market and competitors and how the business is performing. You can’t have a great sales strategy without knowing your customers’ needs and how you can best serve them. This isn’t a one-off to do, but rather an ongoing priority. At any given moment, understanding the voice of the customer, the macro market, competitor moves, and the performance of the business will help drive certain decisions to create a sales strategy that is timely and advantageous.

You’ve defined the organization’s action plan to achieve its sales goals concerning product and service focus, concentration on certain markets. Too often, products or services are internally driven and may not align naturally with customer needs. Prioritizing customers through segmentation and targeting is key. Consider customer industry, sales potential, profitability, common needs and overall fit with your organization.

You know how you will use the company’s channels, roles, processes and resources to go to market.Sales channels and roles integrate with the processes for working with customers. The best customer coverage models are built from the customer’s buying process with a sales process and roles that reflect how the customer prefers to work. Sales deployment maps the level of sales resources needed for each of the sales roles. Deployment is typically guided by a combination of sales capacity (available sales time and workload) to manage current accounts or sell to new accounts, sales role and customer alignments, and logistical factors like geography and travel patterns.

Your quotas setting process is ready, set and accurate.When quotas aren’t set correctly they don’t reflect actual market opportunity. About half of companies end up adjusting quotas mid-year due to rushing the process and missing these important details. The most effective method of quota setting combines a bottom-up perspective from the front line, assessing real market potential, with a top-down perspective on what needs to be sold in order to achieve the company’s revenue goals.

The photo should be credited to Robert Servais/Unsplash.com