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.

SUCCESSFUL SALES STRATEGIES

Value selling and strong sales culture responsible for sales success

While value selling is cited as a top organizational reason for success, and selected by 30% of sales leaders, extreme value is evolving as a differentiated practice. Extreme value is defined by an organization’s ability to facilitate experiences that directly help a buyer navigate business changes as a trusted advisor and do so more effectively than the competition.

SALES CHALLENGES

Sales leaders want more quality pipeline

The leading challenge for sales leaders is not enough quality pipeline from marketing. This continues to be a big number, with 47% of those surveyed choosing this answer (see Figure 3). The issue appears to be more relevant in organizations with smaller deal sizes. Of those citing this challenge, two-thirds of them had ACV of $75,000 or less.

The other consideration for this problem is the alignment with marketing. Marketing leaders have prioritized demand generation and account based strategies, and claim their alignment with sales is a key component of their success. It is hard to imagine that marketing is completely aligned with sales and focused on filling the funnel, yet sales never has enough leads. This is proof that more work is needed to create better alignment between sales and marketing.

The second and third challenges are lack of effective sales enablement and poor execution by individual sales reps, which go hand-in-hand. In this unprecedented age of selling transparency, sales managers must be taught the new kinds of insights that are available to them and should be empowered to practice these with their teams. The promotion of sales enablement leaders to vice presidents and above has raised the awareness of this function in organizations. The growth of sales enablement platforms and conversation intelligence technology indicates that resources are being dedicated to this activity.

Source: Top Challenges Identified by Sales Leaders, Sales Leadership Report 2020, TOPO

TOPO fielded an online survey to sales leaders. The survey was completed by 131 respondents at high- performing companies.