Even with great leadership, as your business grows you may notice the increasing tension between working “in the business” – your day-to-day operations – and working “on the business” – developing future revenue strategy, creating policies to support business performance and dealing with compliance issues.

Eventually, your company will benefit from ‘outside’ executives and/or ‘independent’ directors whose experience will help you work “on the business”. They can bring valuable experience to guide your organization through different revenue growth stages.

Each year annual sales quotas and long-term goals are set. While they are important, when too focused on the end game, it is easy to take your eye off the pipelines. To keep new leads coming into the pipeline, also set manageable prospecting goals.

To get a sales team to perform beyond expectations, we focus on these five essentials: 

• Characteristics of a High Performing Sales Team
• Hiring Best Practices – building the best team
• Data Mining – providing the right data
• CRM – the right tool for your organization
• Training - the ongoing need

Sales-as-a-service (SAAS) is not yet clearly defined and could be considered as software or services (or a combination of both), which provides businesses with “sales capabilities as a service” whereby, businesses can access relevant and crucial sales resources when they need them. For instance, if you are looking for an efficient sales channel or sales team, SAAS software can help you acquire the resources you need to meet your company’s goals.

One of the most common challenges faced by business managers of both established and growing businesses are “how to compensate their sales teams effectively.” Managers need to implement a compensation model that motivates their sales team to land new accounts, while at the same time upselling the existing ones. But, how do you identify the most efficient compensation model to use? And how do you measure performance against the compensation model?  Well, the information given here will answer these and more questions about some of the most efficient sales compensation models to keep a team motivated.

Setting goals is easy, “I will meet my sales goals; I will achieve success in business.” This sound’s great but how will you achieve this (your goals)?  The “how” part is the sales methodology; the strategies you use to achieve your target or goals. Professionals usually refer to sales methodology as the fundamental approach to sales and the terminology used when relating to customers to “close the deal.”  The ‘how’ is usually the most difficult part of a sales process, as it determines whether you succeed or fail in making that sale.

How can you develop a sales methodology to meet your goals? There are different sales methods which have been developed by sales leaders and professionals over many years. You can combine these different sales approaches to developing a sales methodology or use one (single) method.

Sources you can use to develop a sales methodology include books and/or professional training. How you develop a sales methodology will largely depend on your “selling environment,” or your target audience.

Here is a brief summary of sales methodologies
frequently used:

Building SMART Revenue   – Generally speaking

Intelligent revenue generation is vital to any organization, whether it needs revenue to stay in business, wants to grow, or is positioning itself for sale. This is a small sample from our Building SMART Revenue Workshops. As we review SMART revenue generation, you might find ah-ha moments about missing elements in your revenue plan. 

WTIA's (Washington Technology Industry Association) theme in May is DisruptiveTECH. Consider revenue growth opportunities from disruptive technologies in the past, and those projected in the future. This article is a reminder that your company may soon be disrupted or become a disruptor and lead you to a decline in revenue - or amazing revenue growth.

As you look at the disruptive technology examples below, many will be familiar to you. I want to challenge you to pause for a moment and consider how your customers and employees are changing habits in the new world. Buying habits are changing and “sales” has new challenges where the world comes to the buyer and they don’t want to be interrupted. I am hoping a few of the examples will have you scratching your head with amazement and wonder.