Corporate transformation is never easy. In most cases it takes years to create a brand and build an organization to support it. Once established, these hard-wired identities die hard; however, in times of economic uncertainty, transformation not only becomes necessary, it also becomes urgent to cast off the comfortable old processes in favor of something that will actually help you stay competitive.
Sales organizations are currently being confronted with one of those urgent situations – an urgent need to uncover new opportunities and close a large amount of net new business. Old, passive “farming” sales strategies are no longer viable as organizations return to the field and attack new markets. In order to ramp up to meet this urgent challenge, sales organizations are returning to a focused emphasis on prospecting; however, because the need is so urgent, traditional modes of prospecting are not sufficient to address the current crisis. This is true for five reasons:
1. Sales organizations are urgently seeking a greater ROI from sales and marketing activities. Traditional marketing methods are slow and inefficient, they can take months to roll out, they are often poorly targeted, and - to make matters worse – less than 25% of the leads generated by traditional marketing methods are ever followed up, which means the traditional marketing approach is very expensive and has a very poor ROI. Sales organizations simply can’t afford to waste this amount of time and money in today’s uncertain times.
2. Sales organizations are feeling a need for speed. Again, under current conditions, every day you are not growing market share and driving revenue is a day someone else is taking market share and revenue away from you. There is no longer time to wait for poorly qualified, lukewarm leads to drift in from a traditional marketing campaign. Sales teams need to focus on not only active demand resulting from marketing leads, but even more so on latent demand generated by sales driven prospecting efforts in order to create and maintain momentum.
3. Sales organizations urgently need to acquire new skills and develop more effective leadership for both sales reps and sales managers. Whatever prospecting “muscle memory” may be left in most sales organizations is woefully inadequate and outdated to be of much use under these current conditions. For the most part, sales managers don’t understand how to prepare and manage their teams for a sequence of prospecting activities, and a large percentage of sales reps are not comfortable with the idea of prospecting. In order to attack and capture new markets, these organizations need new and highly effective prospecting systems, and they need them fast.
4. Sales organizations urgently need to learn how to work more efficiently. The uncertain economy and lagging revenues have caused many sales organizations to down size. They are now being confronted with the daunting task of trying to do less with more – i.e., drive 20% more revenue with 20% fewer people. They must transform their entire understanding of how to acquire new customers if they are to have any hope of reaching their goals.
5. Sales organizations are now going global in an urgent attempt to attack new markets. It seems that almost overnight, the world has evolved into one giant market. Through either managed expansion or channel partner relationships, corporations are now able to reach all corners of the globe with their products and services. Indeed, in order to drive new revenue and close a high level of net new business, corporations must more aggressively pursue global market opportunities. However, this level of transformation is a huge stretch for some sales organizations, now faced with the challenge of training, measuring, and managing sales teams who are not only not on the same continent, but who may not even speak the same language.
In light of these five urgent drivers, sales organizations must transform – unchain themselves from old, expensive, inefficient, outmoded methods for developing new business and transform their organization to be able to swiftly and effectively attack new markets in a way that leads to net new business and drives revenue while delivering a much higher ROI.
At Baker Communications, we have solved for these problems in a dynamic, powerful way through our array of Coaching in the Cloud™ plays. These plays integrate new skills with very targeted marketing and demand generation programs that deliver 20X1 ROI or better. These results are provable, measurable and repeatable, aligning the interests, goals and objectives of both sales and marketing to drive superior results. Two recent success stories demonstrate the power of Coaching in the Cloud™ plays:
Customers deploying these strategies generate immediate sales pipeline and drive short-term, fast sales impacting the current or the next quarter. The activities of marketing, sales and training co-occur in a highly coordinated, collaborative effort to execute a revenue generation strategy from start to finish. In addition, the delivery mode occurs in the cloud via weekly WebEx meetings that last between 60 – 90 minutes. Plays can run anywhere from four to 12 weeks, and offer:
The greatest value of this program lies in the fact that at the end of the play, both the sales manager and the sales team have built the skills and the prospecting muscle memory they need to repeat this process over and over again until the entire organization has been completely and truly transformed into an efficient, effective, nimble, and aggressive team that can continue to discover and close net new business day after day in any kind of economic climate.
Action questions:
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
This article may be reprinted in its entirety if the following conditions are met:
