Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

The 2020 pandemic served as an accelerant for shifts in the ways B2B buyers engage with sellers. Buyers need sellers to exceed expectations at every interaction on their preferred—and increasingly digital—channels. Modern revenue leaders recognize that the ethos of buying is transitioning from face-to-face relationship building to facilitating buying decisions virtually. Inside sales is now just sales, and with that comes a tsunami of innovation in the form and scale at which revenue teams create extreme value, share information, deliver insights, orchestrate change, generate data, and manage sellers with technology.

The introduction of the TOPO Double Funnel in 2019 showed marketers that it is critical to measure multiple go-to-market (GTM) strategies side-by-side. The TOPO Go-to-Market Framework demonstrates that organizations not only need to find the balance between volume/velocity and account based strategies, but that the two can actually overlap and share tactical approaches.

When searching for “Sales Enablement” the most common response is “what is sales enablement?“. Even though the question of “what is sales enablement” has remained steady, the answer is rapidly evolving, from being viewed as sales tool training, sales content, or occasional sales effectiveness training to become a strategic function.

2020 was supposed to be the year of “2020 Vision” but it was as murky and uncertain as the Hudson river currents. These three popular sales effectiveness posts from 2020 will provide fodder in boosting your sales effectiveness now and into 2021.

No coincidence that the most registered sessions for next weeks TOPO Virtual Summit have “2021” in the title. Perhaps this is a good time of year to start on 2021 but perhaps people are excited about looking forward to a new year?

RevOps is the modern operating model for driving efficient, predictable revenue. Organizations are always looking for revenue growth, and that need increases following a period where sales are flat or negative. Sales and marketing teams scale their efforts to accelerate growth in response to improving economic conditions through a series of specific actions. In other words, specificity wins and bias-towards action will matter most.

The sales enablement function continues to grow— forty-six percent (46%) of teams plan to increase in size in the next 12 months. This growth in headcount will be accompanied by continued spend in technology. The category has seen strong expansion outside of the B2B technology market into new verticals such as Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Life Sciences. While the current extreme work from home environment will subside, a substantial level of remote selling will likely remain and continue to drive demand for sales tech. 

Sales and SDR teams spend their time communicating with prospects to understand their specific tactical challenges, qualify them as a potential customer for the solution, and schedule a more detailed meeting. The more they know about the specific buyer personas that they are communicating with, the more relevant their messaging becomes and the more successful they will be at achieving their objectives.  

Drive prospect engagement by aligning to the attributes of high value offers. A primary function of the go-to-market team is to determine how best to engage prospects in order to progress deals and drive revenue. Organizations that have the most success in driving prospect engagement are those where cross-functional teams come together to create and execute offers that are so compelling and relevant that prospects consider it worth their time to engage. This gets the various teams acting together to make connections with targeted accounts rather than working in silos.

Lead-to-account matching and routing solutions have become a critical piece of the infrastructure required to support these sophisticated GTM organizations. As marketing, sales and the emerging function of revenue operations have become more sophisticated and go-to-market (GTM) processes have become increasingly complex, the technology to enable GTM activity has flourished.