What my 17yrs experience taught me about Sales Performance in Tech Companies?

Any commercial enterprise got to consistently generate sales to sustain and scale. Everything else, costs money. With this belief, I have been aligning myself with the “customer first” mindset. Till date, I have debates about who is paying salaries for the employees? Is it the employer or the customer? I believe, it’s the latter.

Well, if you are a start-up, employees are paid by the founder or the investor 🙂

Here’s the simple view of the organization alignment for better sales performance;

Here are my learnings on what organizations can do to align to improve Sales Performance.

Leadership First :-

1.      Define criteria, goals and objectives.

2.      Commit resources.

3.      Empower and enable teams with training and tools.

4.      Get out of the way.

5.      Offer help.

6.      Trust your team, measure results periodically.

 Marketing Matters :-

1.      Consistent message across “multi-channel”

2.      Do not just “qualify”, focus on “optifying” leads

3.      Thought Leadership – content and insights driven marketing

4.      Customize “value drivers” per customer business environment

5.      Give value first – mini-workshop, whitepapers, articles, webinars

6.      Focus on “mindshare” prior to “wallet-share”

Sales Superstars :-

1.      Inside Sales, Field-sales Executives, Account Executives, Sales Enablement

2.      Connect with customer’s key decision-makers – emotionally, personally, professionally

3.      Create “contextual conversations,” no “spray and pray”

4.      Demonstrate depth

5.      Align and advise, don’t sell.

Customer Engagement :-

1.      Transform customer transactions to interactions

1.      2.. Engage emotionally – listen with empathy and solve issues with urgency

2.      Build trust and bond with customers having issues

3.      Gather feedback – commit to continuous improvement

4.      Act on feedback – communicate to customers on the steps you have taken to serve them better.

I have had many frustrating occasions due to lack of collaboration and communication between the teams resulting in average sales performance and conversation to conversion ratio. Fortunately, later in my career, I got the opportunity to set-up teams to address this gap to enable collaboration between inside sales, field sales and marketing for better Sales Performance.

Thank you for your time. I would love to know your experience, insights and views…