Winning in a competitive market starts with having a top-notch product or service, but it doesn’t end there. How your reps sell is directly related too how much they sell, says Jason Loh, global head of sales solutions at Anaplan (anaplan.com), a Web-based platform for business planning.
“Your product is a known quantity. Your customers are already researching it. Your competitors are already trying to steal it. Success today comes from the methods sales leaders use to set up their team and take down a market. It comes from the way sales teams set up territories and quotas, measure their effectiveness, and adapt to changes,” Loh says.
Those businesses that have the smartest go-to-market strategies will likely come out ahead. In order to take full advantage of technology that streamlines the sales process, Loh recommends these three priorities:
- Sales planning – Include things like territory and quota planning, sales coverage and account segmentation. It’s the glue that connects high-level boardroom strategy to field execution, telling your team how to attack your market, while making sure you wield the strengths of individual salespeople to most effectively serve your sales goals.
- Sales incentives – Today’s incentives are increasingly sophisticated and individualized, and sales leaders are using advanced technology to make incentives more reliable.
- Sales insights – The information you need to gather and analyze to make the right decisions. This includes pipeline management, sales forecasting and other important measurements.
Today’s advanced technologies are able to give sales leaders a view into their entire go-to-market strategy, combining high-level and granular perspectives so that sales leaders can see what parts are working and what parts aren’t. These technologies also offer robust modeling capabilities that can better predict how changes in one aspect of the strategy will impact all the others.
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