Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

As sellers across multiple markets face an increasingly commoditized and hyper-competitive buying environment, sales leaders help lead the organization through rigorous change in pursuit of one goal: help deliver extreme value to prospects throughout the buying process, and thus, exceed quarterly targets. The pursuit of extreme value spawns rigorous resource prioritization and a significant investment in a new kind of sales culture full of transparency, feedback, and coaching. Meanwhile, as fast-growing companies rapidly evolve, sales leaders find themselves evaluating tradeoffs between people, process, technology, tactics, and metrics.

At the end of every year, TOPO reviews the data we’ve gathered through client interactions and industry surveys to analyze trends and make predictions for the coming year. What sets TOPO apart is that we work with high-growth organizations, meaning the data we review is from businesses that are often far ahead of typical companies. We monitor the early adopters of many innovative technologies and processes, which gives us a unique perspective into what other organizations can expect to happen.

Sales technology changes constantly and rapidly, which is why TOPO analysts continually gather data, talk to companies, and study the entire sales landscape to pinpoint the latest market trends. Considering how much of their budgets sales organizations spend on technology, it is crucial to have guidance about the areas of tech that are most important and what other sales leaders—especially competitors—are doing about them.

Analyses of sales effectiveness are usually based on the views of sales leaders. While those opinions are clearly important, it is equally important to hear about the day-to-day realities of sales directly from the reps in the trenches. That is why the TOPO Sales Sentiment Index (SSI) is based on feedback from sales reps themselves.

The only thing growing faster than our clients revenue today is the change they face in order to sustain growth. 

With our mission to help sales and marketing organizations grow revenue faster, we are excited to share that TOPO has agreed to be acquired by Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company. 

Sales development reps (SDRs) are responsible for creating qualified meetings for sales reps. While this seems like a straightforward process, TOPO has identified a breaking point.

Many sales organizations fail to address what happens before and after SDRs set up those meetings. This oversight creates confusion.

SDRs pass leads before they are fully qualified, sales ignores qualified leads, or sales fails to document what happened in the meeting and next steps. More often than not, issues like these lead to a lack of alignment and the SDR program suffers.

A trial provides prospects an opportunity to test a vendor’s solution before purchasing. In the age of Software as a Service (SaaS), many technology companies provide self-serve demos. While this works for single-user purchases, it’s not as effective for more complex purchases where multiple stakeholders are forced to navigate the intricacies of trials on their own.

In our first post on sales enablement, we explained the optimal sales enablement stack and the trends influencing its evolution. In part two of the series, we focus on the market landscape, along with TOPO’s predictions and buyer guidance.

One of the key factors for sales success is an organization’s ability to enable sales by providing the required resources to sell effectively. The more fluid and effective a sales rep’s interactions with a buyer, the faster reps can close each deal. And the faster they can close, the more deals they can close. That’s where sales enablement technology comes into play.

The success of a modern sales organization starts before the first sales person even walks in the door. A well-conceived go-to-market strategy, sales playbook, and messaging framework are the foundation for every sales call. Ongoing training on the right processes and the right technology keeps a sales team effective, efficient, and on the same path.