The Golden Sales pipeline that solves the 80/20 revenue problem
In August 2022, we performed a series of qualitative interviews with 30 leaders from selected parts of the internal value chain to understand the challenges that effect the customer experience (CX).
The value chain is the collection of an organisation’s strategic and supportive activities that generate customer value (margin). A value chain study allows us to assess where true value is created and where improvements should be made. A company can gain competitive advantage by performing these activities more effectively than its competitors.
For the Sales leader interviews, we spoke to those from small to large sized companies of 5 to 1000+ employees. Industries included Technology, Energy, Financial Services, Recruitment, Education, Biotechnology, Transportation, Healthcare, Legal, Professional Services and FMCG.
What does a Sales Director/leader do?
Sales leaders and Account directors run the front-line teams. They are the point of contact between a business and its prospects or clients and have a range of responsibilities including identifying and educating prospective customers while supporting existing clients with information and assistance relating to products and services. They are critical in driving the revenue for the company.
What has changed in a Sales Leader’s role?
Sales Leaders need to be more than just experts in persuasion… They need to train their sales teams, ensure IT creates the right CRM and Sales tracking systems and that marketing produces content the team can use. Additionally, they need to educate their teams on the art of social selling via tweets and blogs (that are aligned to marketing) to build credibility and relationships particularly in the long B2B sales cycle. Most importantly, the alignment between sales and marketing is even more critical these days – it’s not a case of throwing leads over the fence to sales. These two teams MUST work together.
Internal engagement, alignment, and support
Sales and Account leaders sometimes feel that revenue generation sits heavily on their shoulders with limited cross-functional support to help them build the pipeline. Often, they could benefit from support from their technical product or service experts in a sales conversation OR with a marketing campaign to start warming clients before they contact them, but “teams are in heads down delivery mode”. This is across all teams like HR, product, and Marketing. They struggle to find up-to-date contact information in the CRM because both sales and other customer facing teams are not updating the contacts PLUS the systems aren’t integrated or automated, which can often lead to embarrassing customer conversations or missed opportunities. Sales leaders would benefit from performing an internal review of the sales and marketing process/systems to provide recommendations of how they could scale up, automate, and simplify the selling process to close those sales quicker.
Building customer relationships and insights
Sales need to bring value to a customer meeting to build relationships. But large customer organisations are complex to navigate with large decision-making committees, continual restructures, and objective shifts. This makes it hard to identify and demonstrate value that is relevant to each specific buying committee member at the right time. Customer consideration is driven by respect, credibility and engagement which relies heavily on the marketing teams to build this through campaigns and sales enablement (sales materials). But often campaigns are misaligned and selling materials are not relevant (content and formats) and are often redundant in the sales teams. Some Sales leaders felt they could be better supported by “a Marketing & Sales Ops role that analysed data and set joint planning, created sales playbooks and processes”. A good start to building customer relationships and alignment is to kick-start a small Account Based Marketing pilot campaign that identifies and engages the target high value accounts and its buying committee.
Capture Value proposition through customer conversations
“Sales are on the knife edge of Market Forces and sit on the customer frontline” and many felt sales conversations are key to understanding client topics and pain points for the broader organisation, like product development, comms etc., but they lack the process to share/implement feedback. Where Sales leaders have a feedback process – these customer insights have accelerated payback and decisions with diversified propositions and markets that increased their margins.
Prioritising talent through targeting insights and processes
Many teams have low team resource due to cutbacks or the current talent churn factor and so they “need to prioritise targeting efforts and customer deliverables”. Additionally, when new talent arrives, they need to be able to onboard them fast and many leaders struggled to quickly upskill new starters on products/ services with no defined sales processes or consistent sales enablement. In B2B, 80% of their revenue is coming from 20% of their accounts. Despite having significant data, sales and accounts teams lacked the capability and capacity to create data insights that told the story of their customers like average spend, sales cycle by industry or product. They want further sales insights to predict an acquisition and revenue pipeline and identify target segments from current accounts to use as a look-a-like segment to target new accounts more accurately. Sales Leaders would have confidence on how to competitively pitch their products and services and increase cross sell and upsell opportunities by conducting ABM analysis on their customer data for Engagement, reviewing their Customer Experience and researching their competitors to create a clear positioning map that both Sales and Marketing could use.
No data insights (analysis) or GTM strategy for new market territories
Many Sales teams are sent in cold to develop new markets and they lack a framework or insights that directs them how and where to tackle major or emerging markets. This is more complex when they don’t have local feet on the ground in these new regions with the cultural understanding. They often must make decisions blind, based on assumptions, outdated or no marketing and competitor insights. If a market is in growth, there is little understanding for the appetite for their type of product or service and factors/problems affecting those customer industries/target segments. Performing both competitor and market research on the new market would simplify sales decisions and help them align with marketing on the GTM targeting strategy.
Summary
A good sales leader will always need to teach the art of persuading leads to turn into sales. However, in today’s marketplace, sales leaders must evolve their skillsets to apply different lenses of operations, social, and marketing into their day to day. They could achieve this by performing an internal CX review on Sales and marketing (processes and tools), performing external research on competitors, a market discovery for new territories and tier their accounts to take steps towards Account Based Marketing (ABM) to identify high value target accounts to align with marketing.
Alternate opportunities
But this is a big To Do list and Sales leaders recognised they don’t have the capacity or capability to support this work which would be easier to overcome with an external research expert that would ….
- Create an unbiased review that:
- Internally, identifies the gaps to create a slick sales support process and team.
- Externally, to highlight customer insights and pain points that outperforms competitors.
- Increase the sales team’s confidence with a simple Ven diagram about their competitive sweet spot.
- Produce growth potential in new territories and markets, target high value industry verticals and stimulate sales conversations through customer’s industry trends.
- Create a market-researched solution for a specific sales issue e.g. pricing and process strategies.
- Address the 80/20 revenue problem that lands and expands accounts through a pilot ABM plan that’s relevant to your resources and systems.
If you need some help overcoming some of these challenges, drop us a line or read more about our services here.
