Talk to any CEO about what keeps them up at night and at least one of the following will be on that list:
Quick Start Strategies 2021 Sales Optimization Survey found that 78% of executives from participating companies with annual revenues between $20m to $3.5b do not believe they can achieve their projected revenue objectives.
The top reason provided for this lack of was ‘not having trusted insights’ to make critical business decisions.
High performing companies from the survey – those with 30%+ organic sales growth – exhibited several consistent traits. Beyond having accurate data they could trust, each high performer focused on and leveraged a suite of sales KPIs to monitor and deliver business insights.
Over the past 7 years, across all client engagements, QSS has found that consistent performance and predictability relate directly to: Mechanics and Sustainability.
Mechanics are a unique set of actions and activities throughout your defined sales process that optimize the probability of an opportunity being ‘closed/won.’ Mechanics are not an adrenaline shot such as periodic sales coaching and training, but rather a disciplined approach to ensure that each pipeline opportunity adheres to a set of opportunity management actions such as the 4Rights:
Sustainability is achieved by applying your sales mechanics to achieve consistent, quarter-on-quarter, stated revenue objectives. Sustainability is no accident, but rather the logical outcome resulting from applying rigor and discipline to individuals and teams to measure, assess, and deliver accurate top of pipeline visibility and bottom of pipeline sales performance.
Companies that QSS has worked with that have erratic or underperforming revenue results lack the fundamental mechanics to sustain revenue growth. This most often results in:
If your company is underperforming or erratic, you can begin to improve your performance by getting answers to tough questions aligned to three critical components of your business.
How would you rate your company’s revenue performance over the last 4 quarters: high performing, erratic, or underperforming? What level of confidence do you have in your current forecast?
What insights do you have into the health of your sales process?
Do you have a suite of dashboards that you trust to provide insights and guidance to what truly drives success? Do you have insights and clear predictors of those opportunities that are, and are not, aligned with winning?
Do you have accurate data you trust to take actions?
Do you have accurate data? Looking back over the past 4 to 8 quarters can you identify those specific metrics and attributes that dictate your highest probability of winning or losing an opportunity?
Companies that have successfully moved from underperforming to sustained revenue performance have deployed the following corrective actions:
Those companies in the 2021 survey that achieved revenue sustainability through a well-defined suite of mechanics saw the following upside benefits:
Mastering the alignment of mechanics to sustainability will deliver ongoing business value to the entire organization through revenue performance, revenue predictability, and insights.
