Insights and Research for Marketing, Sales Development and Sales

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.

Hiring and career plans keep the team growing as it succeeds. The operations team running in the background makes sure sales people have what they need to close deals. And finally, a measurement plan demonstrates to the entire organization that the world-class sales team is meeting or exceeding its goals every week, month, and quarter.

The TOPO Sales Framework is a standard methodology practiced by the world’s fastest-growing companies and supported by research into sales practices. This is a series of repeatable activities that are organized into 10 categories and can be used to build, or iteratively improve, a sales organization.

Market: Define and agree on target accounts by creating the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and identifying the key individuals at those accounts involved in the buying decision.

Go-To-Market: Develop a strategy to align the organization against the target market including areas such as the revenue objective, territory coverage model, segmentation, and data strategy.

Organization: Establish the organizational infrastructure including the elements for attracting, hiring, and retaining sales resources.

Process: Create strategies and systems that help the sales organization run effectively including determining the criteria that define each stage in the revenue process and what is required to advance, as well as defining the milestones across the sales process from new opportunity to closed-won.

Technology: Build a technology stack to drive scale and automation that makes sales reps more efficient during each phase of the sales cycle and enables sales leadership to plan and execute go-to-market and operational initiatives. This includes the people, curriculum, tools, templates, and certifications required to onboard and train sales reps, as well as configure and maintain tools.

Operations: Devise and implement the end-to-end operational plan focused on rep productivity, efficiency, and execution with quota planning, forecasting, and the deal desk that supports enterprise sales teams on complex pricing, contracts, RFP responses, and nonstandard deal requests.

Messaging: Provide the foundation for creating and delivering customized and relevant messages that connect with prospects and illustrate how the solution will impact their company. This starts with a messaging framework and includes definitions of personas, insights, value props, use cases, and objection handling, plus a competitive matrix that critically profiles and compares a company against known competitors.

Plays: Define each step and action from initial outreach to close as the essential, prescriptive, repeatable sales motions of every sales cycle. These include prospecting, discovery, presentation, demo, trial, proposal, close, an account plan, an opportunity plan, and a stakeholder map.

Enablement: Create instruction and content to drive the onboarding, training, and coaching of sales reps that is critical to the success of sales teams. This also includes playbooks and certifications so sales reps know what to do and can be certified doing it.

Measurement: Use dashboards and reports to assess sales performance that supports the revenue model, effective forecasting, and operations.

Companies that follow the TOPO Sales Framework below will discover improvements in both the day-to-day operations and the closed-won rates of their sales reps.