I’ve been with McKinsey for 20 years, and sales excellence is a huge topic for our clients. If you think about it, a lot of companies spend somewhere between 5% to 15% of revenue on sales. The way you deploy and use that investment makes a huge difference on both top-line growth and bottom-line performance. Getting it right is super important.
Based on the work we’ve done with clients, plus our own internal research over the past five years, we’ve really tried to get to the heart of how organisations can successfully drive sales excellence.
What we’ve found is that there are five core components to accomplishing this:
1. Identify the right opportunities.
The key is to go where the opportunity is going to be next year and the year after. Companies that are able to identify and map out opportunities — and then align their go-to-market accordingly — are much more successful.
2. Match the right opportunities with the right people.
In order to get the right people and the right partners in the right spot, there are three things you need to keep in mind. One is the go-to-market architecture (the mix of routes to market you use). The second is the sales planning process to then allocate people to those routes. The third is to do the skills assessment to make sure that those folks are equipped to win the deals when they have the opportunity.
3. Deliver the perfect customer pitch.
Once you have identified opportunities and you have the right people and partners aligned to those opportunities, you want to make sure that those sales folks or partners deliver the right pitch. And you shouldn’t leave that to chance. You should apply science and process to it.
4. Do all of the above consistently.
If you think about sales forces, they’re by definition dispersed across geographies, product lines, and routes to market. At the same time, if you’re going to drive sales excellence, especially in large, complex companies, you have to have a degree of centrally driven initiatives and change.
To read the complete article “5 Proven Methods for Driving Sales Excellence in Your Organization,” visit Quotable.
