Once you have nailed the product market fit in the seed stage, your focus in Series A is determining whether a small set of sales reps can meet your target revenue number. In other words, can they convert interested, relevant buyers into real opportunities and deals? At this point, you should be looking for ways to optimize the sales process so that you can prove your model is viable at scale.
In part 2 of this series on our Sales Management Market Guide, TOPO focuses on how these technologies deliver value to sales leaders, key considerations when evaluating sales management technology, and the increasing demand for insights and engagement.
The Sales Team Lifecycle is a roadmap companies can follow to effectively put in place the right salespeople, processes, technology, and metrics as they grow from seed to Series C. This roadmap provides a proven approach to aligning the sales team with the company’s size and growth, and setting expectations for what is required at each stage. By following this framework, companies can avoid making the mistakes that introduce unnecessary risk into their sales organizations, go-to-market strategies, and growth plans.
A world-class sales development organization starts with a plan. As the team on the front lines communicating the value of the company to prospects every day, they need to be prepared. TOPO’s framework helps define the necessary strategy and development of processes and procedures for company growth.
Predictable sales execution is the most important aspect of successful sales from leadership to the sales rep. Today, the ability to deliver on these core responsibilities is not optimized. The day-to-day tasks of reviewing the pipeline, recommending next best actions, and creating forecast visibility suffer from imperfect data. Data that is only partially recalled by the reps and therefore entered incorrectly. Data that falls through the cracks and is left out of the database altogether. Data that is not optimally captured and therefore not visible. Data that is visible, but not easily scanned by busy sales leaders. Data, in other words, that is suboptimal—and therefore leads to unsatisfactory sales results.
The key objective of every B2B company is revenue growth. With this in mind, one would think organizations would capitalize on any available advantage to increase the percentage of deals that close. Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is just such an advantage, and it provides a number of other benefits.
Sales Development role in account based programs is the biggest story in sales development today. The role SDR’s play is a critical piece of the account based movement but its really really hard to pull off. This story and more emerged in the 2019 TOPO Sales Development Benchmark.