How to Ensure That Your 2018 Growth Strategy Enables Maximum Results
How to Ensure That Your 2018 Growth Strategy Enables Maximum Results
By Mike Jackson @ SalesKarma
Still looking for that perfect New Year’s resolution? How about enabling your selling team(s) to work more effectively and efficiently to maximize growth results in 2018? January & February is a great time for key growth stakeholders to briefly engage in a focused strategy work session to challenge, tweak, and finalize your company’s 2018 growth strategy. Providing clear “go to market” priorities and focused support will align, engage, and motivate your selling team(s) to build more qualified Q1 growth pipeline and realize more new revenue wins sooner.The strategic work session must have clear structure and goals, involve multiple internal growth stakeholders and be centered around your “ideal” client’s top needs. The most successful work sessions that I’ve experienced or facilitated contain some combination of the following traits:• Participants include the Owner/CEO, sales leader(s), marketing leader, and client management leader. Add two successful sales executives and account managers (sound like a recipe yet?) who are most in touch with your target client’s greatest business challenges, needs, and opportunities to provide more value.• A designated work session date and two-hour time slot. The allotted time slot should ideally be either before or after those prime sales productivity hours of 9 am to 3 pm. • An “In person” work session is required for best results. If one or two participants need to dial in, that’s fine. The work session should not exceed 8 participants.• Designate a facilitator to lead the work session and a scribe to capture all salient ideas, recommendations, and output. All participants actively contribute and jointly work toward identifying your “ideal” client’s top 5 pain points and greatest needs in 2018. Best to build strategic imperatives around your “ideal” clients versus those few less desirable and often vocal clients. And as your team identifies those top needs, be sure to test that your business can actually solve for those needs better than the client’s other options (e.g. do nothing, do it themselves, competitors). Tip: Output should be summarized, refined and shared with participants within 24 hours post session. Participants then provide supplemental feedback for the facilitator or sponsoring leader to finalize output within 2 days for broader distribution.There should be pre-session homework to provide all participants with a common knowledge foundation and optimize work session productivity. A designated sales operations or support person should coordinate, prepare and share the following materials for all participants to review at least three days in advance of the session. Materials include:• Sales and revenue analysis summary of full year 2017 performance, salient observations and insights. • Summary of client expressed greatest needs and improvement opportunities via surveys, interviews, or captured in your CRM database. Participants will often challenge some of this output, which is good, and add much more to the client observations and needs portion of the work session.• Top 3 most credible thought leadership research documents, whitepapers or articles (for your Industry/Target segments) addressing the hottest topics, mega-trends, and opportunities that your client decision makers actually care about.This strategic work session is extremely valuable for many reasons. 1. All stakeholders put aside department priorities to collaborate, jointly understand, and solve for your target client’s greatest needs. 2. Session output will help leaders to refine and complement your business’s 2018 growth strategy and “Go To Market” priorities. 3. Your sales and marketing support resources can immediately begin working on those shared Q1 priority “Go To Market” support materials, marketing calendar and client education/challenge opportunities. 4. You just created the agenda highlight for your Q1 sales team kickoff. 5. Individual selling, marketing, and account management colleagues can integrate priorities into their aligned individual 2018 goals and performance plans. This list of benefits goes on and on.Not sold on this best practice yet? For those companies that do this critical exercise well … their growth strategy centers around their “ideal” client’s top priorities, “real” Q1 pipeline building is accelerated, and the sales and marketing teams have clear direction. On the flip side, many companies avoid that “all too common” Q1 sales pipeline disappearing act after an exhausting December sprint to close 2017 deals. Sound familiar?Last and especially as the amount of unsolicited information, noise and email/phone disruptions continues to accelerate for all of us … providing your front lines with a laser focus on your client’s greatest needs will help separate your team of professionals from the pack. Your clients will definitely take notice and appreciate your investment in understanding, educating, and helping them solve for their greatest needs. Good luck and make 2018 your business’s best growth year yet.
