A Profitable Growth Formula for Sales Managers
Sales organizations that successfully achieve profitable revenue
growth do so through a sales system encompassing sales focus,
the integration of organizational and people competencies, a
balanced sales effort between new customer acquisition and
current customer penetration, and employee engagement.
These organizations match sales resources to the best
opportunities, often overlooking customary territorial
boundaries or customer assignments and applying a "best in
front" approach in the allocation of sales people to high value
opportunities. They've adopted cross-functional team selling
approaches - emphasizing collaboration to deliver value-adding
solutions and hold sales/service teams accountable for improved
customer-level results. In addition, they utilize their full
organizational capabilities, and those of their external
partners, to create an integrated product/service offering that
enhances their customers' business results, differentiate their
value proposition from the competition, increase the average
deal size, "win" the sale, and build durable customer
relationships.
While highly effective sales organizations emphasize new
customer acquisition, they also recognize that creating new
customers is more expensive than penetrating current accounts.
Furthermore, they know the temptation is great to discount the
initial sale to "get in the door" - producing less profitable
business through an expensive sales effort. So, they balance new
customer selling with a focus on "deep drilling" current
customers with existing and new products. They are also sensible
about discounting. Pragmatic sales leaders know when and when
not to discount, recognizing that in the long run significantly
more discounted revenue is needed to equalize the profit
generated from non-discounted sales.
Sales representatives in growth-focused sales organizations
spend at least 55% to 65% of their time on direct sales
activities. Their leaders achieve this concentration by: