Drive organisational as well as operational alignment across the sales, marketing, and customer success teams, to ensure they are moving in the same direction. This allows the teams to track shared goals, communicate freely about workflow, obstacles, and wins. By working together, aligned teams can deliver high-impact activities, boost effectiveness and ultimately grow revenue.

Go-to-market plans: Develop go-to-market plans to achieve goals and accomplish success

Empower business leaders to design, model, test, and optimise strategic sales plans (supported by marketing) that best utilise commercial investments to help ensure the company achieves its targets and goals.

Segmentation is a critical part of developing effective plans, truly understanding how your customers buy, not just by typical firmographic or demographic criteria. Today, there is an opportunity to include behavioural/ psychographic and external data to identify key opportunities.

• Drive focus and prioritisation by segmenting the market into opportunity categories (e.g., by size, by industry or region) and developing plans by segment. In fact, some organisations utilise multiple segmentation options simultaneously, to test which will be the most effective – so it’s critical not to limit thinking.
• Carve balanced, equitable territory plans that capitalise on market opportunity to provide salespeople with paths to hit revenue goals.
• Eliminate overlaps and coverage gaps and adjust plans on the fly to accommodate changes in headcount, sales capacity, market disruptions, and shifting priorities.

Weekly reviews of all promotions and advertising efforts enable organisations to invest in categories with relatively stable demand, while holding off on discretionary categories that may not be a priority for consumers. For expanding categories, organisations should dedicate resources to manage SKU-level details.

Executives should plan to rapidly adapt their marketing and sales plans to reflect the changing consumer patterns, as well as consumer sentiment, supported by real-time testing, iteration and measurement.

Performance levers: Optimise performance levers for sales that drive motivation to desired outcomes

Unlock behaviour drivers that support your go-to- market strategy by tying incentive programs to the organisation’s strategic goals.

• Create (or optimise) variable incentive programs that inspire sellers and help retain talent while driving performance and maximising results.
• Align compensation budgets to corporate objectives to model attainment costs and returns-on-investment to corporate goals and incentive types.
• Share credits across sellers and teams, driving behaviours and reinforcing sales culture.
• Develop accelerators and SPIFs to aid in short-term performance adjustments.
• Minimise disputes and increase confidence by automating error-prone manual processes and providing sellers access to real-time insights into attainments, earnings, and pay-outs.

Sales excellence: Increase accuracy and foster a commitment to sales excellence

Provide revenue leaders with the ability to deliver more accurate revenue forecasts, reduce pipeline bloat, and focus sales efforts on the strategic and the winnable.

• Analyse, model, and forecast all revenue sources, including new sales, upsell/cross-sell expansions, renewals, consumption, and churn.
• Standardise forecast projections by aggregating cross-organisational sales and marketing data from multiple CRM/POS systems.
• Model impact of potential marketing investments to feed top-of-funnel demand activities.
• Develop contingency plans and ideas to account for market disruptions, supply chain disruptions, or even shifting consumer needs.
• Adjust pricing plans and promotional budgets to align with the projected demand curve across the portfolio. New promotions tactics, such as bundling higher-demand and lower-demand SKUs, can support products whose demand curves are declining.
• Apply protocols to mitigate bias and intuition from pipeline data.

Develop insights with customer profitability, product profitability, discount, and margin analysis. Analyse forecasts across multiple hierarchies, including geography, customer segment, product, leadership, and more.

Leaders should look for patterns that emerge from the data. Seasonal patterns, for instance can be complex varying on a weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis. Also, patterns can gradually change over time, owing to business initiatives – so it’s important to keep track of each impact. Incorporating historical data can help create more robust forecasting.

As the pandemic has shown, organisations may need to consider technologies for their sales force to improve virtual selling in the longer term. Additionally, organisations need to have the agility to reallocate field sales and resources to the channels, customers and geographies that are experiencing high demand.

For further information, including how to leverage advanced analytics, download our sales performance management guide