After years of steadily growing market share, revenue has stalled out — so, you’ve
Quotas are increased and challenges have been issued:
“We will be a high-performing sales organization.”
“We will move from a transactional sale to a strategic sale.”
“We will increase wallet share with customers.”
Now, the internal temperature starts rising
- Conservative investments in people, processes, and resources have been approved.
- However, while the goal was to turn up the heat, in reality, the push for more revenue stresses the sales organization.
- The palpable pressure causes cracks to appear in your processes and in people's performance. Now even your baseline revenue may be at risk.
Why does this tend to happen?
- Because your sales organization was constructed to handle your current level of revenue.
- Hoisting new demands on that same infrastructure compromises it. The line you are walking is between bending and breakage.
- And what seems like obvious actions to take such as adding new headcount, training, and tools, don’t fix the problem they add to it.
Let’s get this out of the way...
- There is no silver bullet to reaching that next tier of revenue. If there was, you would have found it.
- And contrary to the conventional growth advice floating around, you can't hire, optimize, or data-analyze your way to it either, at least at first.
- In his excellent book, Atomic Habits, James Clear states "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."
- Systems. It's where you start. In most cases, there are three root causes of why revenue stalls out in most companies.
It’s Critical to Seek and Eliminate Internal Growth Disablers.
- Sort of like looking for hidden sugar in your diet that may be hindering efforts to slim down, it’s common for growth disablers to lurk within the nooks and crannies of your sales organization
- Resist the urge to add more quota, tools, and training to your current infrastructure. Instead, conduct a performance accounting of your revenue organization to identify the balance of Growth Building Units (GBUs) vs. Growth Depleting Units (GDUs).
- Your sales organization’s balance of GBUs versus GDUs is within your span of control as a leader.
Now It’s Time to Supercharge Your Sales Organization for Growth.
- Capture and prioritize how your team will address growth depleters that were uncovered during your performance accounting.
- Next, you want to add fortifying pillars to your sales organization infrastructure. These include Strategic Communication Campaigns, Integrated Development, and Change Methodology.
- The final fortifier is establishing Customer Feedback Loops – once you’ve addressed your own organization’s role in diminishing growth, this pillar will enable your business to gather valuable, external intelligence.
- Once you have your balance of GBUs & GDUs, it’s time to go to work and supercharge your sales organization for growth.
- While addressing newly discovered growth depleters, it’s time to install some fortifiers, like Strategic Communication Campaigns, Integrated Development, and Change Methodology.
- The final fortifier is establishing Customer feedback loops – once you’ve addressed your own organization’s role in diminishing growth, you are now ready to gather intelligence on subtle shifts and opportunities in the marketplace.
Feedback Loops Reveal Marketplace Shifts and Opportunities.
- By producing proprietary, organic insights. Taking the next steps doesn’t have to be hard, arduous work – but it does require some focus and commitment.
- These organic insights will help your business capitalize on deepening wallet share, opening new channels, pursuing blue ocean strategies and more.
- The fortifying pillars will ensure your internal infrastructure has the knowledge, talent and capability to flex to these new growth horizons without straining the system.
- Fix the productivity cracks, lay the groundwork for growth, siphon intelligence from customers in your orbit and the revenue will follow.
