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Selling in the Age of Ceaseless Change


Sales organizations are better at hitting their revenue goals; 94 percent of commitments were met in 2018, making it the third straight year of growth. But while revenues seem solid, it’s not because of sales performance.
As per the Miller Heiman, “The 2018-2019 Sales Performance Report”, sellers are no more successful than they were three years ago, and performance and productivity aren’t driving revenue growth.
With the goal of reversing these trends, based on the Miller Heiman research insights from nearly 900 global sales leaders the report explores what made the top performing sales organisations so successful in 2018 and provides actionable steps for achieving the top four sales goals in 2019.
1.The immediate steps to increasing win rates this year
The factors that help companies achieve their goal of increasing win rates.

If you intend to bet either on process or on relationships, pick relationships- If the primary focus of organization’s is on increasing win rates, then invest in deepening relationships.

Provide more than product information- One aspect of sales methodology prevalent in Level 3 organizations is the ability to provide perspective and insights during the sales process.


2. How to actually improve lead generation
Sales start with leads. As such, the effectiveness of lead generation processes determines a sales leader’s future success. Despite a constant focus on leads, many sales leaders continue to struggle to answer:
• What is a lead?
• Where do leads actually come from?
• Which leads are the best?
• Who should own them?
• How do we use technologies like marketing automation to improve effectiveness?

Salespeople still generate the most leads- The Miller Heiman research finds that the better aligned marketing and sales social strategies are, the better the social selling adoption is, and the better quota attainment and win rates are.

Alignment on lead definition is getting worse- A lead definition should be tailored to fit the ideal customer profile, specify various stages of lead maturity up to “sales-ready,” and establish marketing and sales responsibilities along the customer’s path.

Nurturing leads requires collaboration- Lead definition is only one side of the coin; a common approach to lead nurturing is the other.

3.   The keys to securing new accounts
“Grow market share” is a never-ending goal for most sales organizations. Clearly, knowing what you want to accomplish is important:

Prospect prioritization is critical, but difficult- Only 43.3% of firms received a “meets or exceeds expectations” for prospect prioritization, compared to 56.7% of those who had a rating of “needs major redesign or needs improvement.”

Closing abilities improve when the sales process is aligned- The highest performing sales organizations had a high degree of alignment between their sales process and the customer’s path.

Plan your work, then work your plan- A strong majority (82.9%) of the sales organizations exceeding expectations in opportunity planning noted closing new business as a strength.

4.     How to expand penetration among existing customers
The second most important objective for sales leaders to meet their goals was increasing the penetration into their existing accounts.

Account management gaps- The sales leaders shared their perceptions on several key competencies and reported large and consistent gaps.

Customer loyalty is the bigger picture- Cross-sales and business-unit penetration are clearly key. Customer loyalty is surely a lofty goal, increasing penetration of existing accounts requires looking at customer relationships before and after the sales process.

It’s not an issue of time; it’s an issue of planning- One challenge sales executives face is where to spend time, in capturing new accounts or growing existing accounts? Investing more time is not necessarily the answer, rigorous account planning helps.

What makes the organizations unique is their holistic focus on the customer as demonstrated by a customer-centric culture, a sales process that is aligned to the customer’s path and a strong ability to provide value to the customer in terms of perspective and insights.

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