The increased pace of change in today’s business environment has made running a sales organization more demanding than it has ever been! Sales leadership is being challenged by new demands from clients and priorities sent down from the CEO and the Board. To stay out in front of these demands, we have found that the sales leadership/Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) are consistently thinking about and “tuning” their points of view in the following four areas as they drive for success in 2012:

Sales Effectiveness Tip 1: Clear Vision of Success
CSOs must have a clear vision about what their sales team needs to do to succeed with clients and thus meet their sales goals in 2011. However, a clear vision of what must be done to increase sales is not enough. The CSO must also have the ability to articulate the vision, define the strategies that give the vision “traction” and the courage to implement the processes, policies, systems and competencies that will reinforce the vision and make it a reality. A lot has changed in the last few years, and many organizations are revisiting their vision of success. CSOs are thinking “do we have clear vision, sound strategies, and solid structure that provides for client satisfaction, the achievement of our goals, and clear differentiation from our competition?”

Sales Effectiveness Tip 2: Real Client Focus
In reality, being client focused is a lot easier said than done. As part of becoming client focused, a CSO wants to align their selling practices to the buying process of their clients. However, the ability to do so successfully is often a paradox created by the short-term grind to meet this month’s sales goals, versus the desire for long-term relationships that require alignment with the client’s buying model. Successful sales leadership goes beyond asking “what will we close this month or quarter?”, and asks “what do we need to do to align our sales operations closely with the buying model and cadence of our clients?” CSOs are asking “do we have a process map of our best client’s buying model?” “How does it align with our sales process?”

Sales Effectiveness Tip 3: Development of Sales Management
Successful sales people (individual contributors) are often well recognized for their success within a company. When they win the big deal, even in a team-selling environment, it is the sales person who gets the majority of the incentive compensation and the recognition. However, the success of most sales people is a direct result of effective sales management, and these sales managers frequently don’t get near as much attention or support. Consider this, a typical sales person who is responsible for selling a high-value product or service will receive 3 to 6 sales training courses (about us/sales process, strategic selling, tactical selling, personality typing, negotiation, etc). However, a sales manager is typically provided little or no formal training, and yet need to broaden and improve their skills in a number of areas (coaching/facilitation, finance, communications, performance management/HR, etc.). CSOs are recognizing and addressing this issue. They know that their sales management team is the key leverage point for on-going sales success.

Sales Effectiveness Tip 4: Productivity of the Sales Function
CSOs are driving Sales Effectiveness – hard. They need to get an increasingly better return from the “spend” on their sales organization to have a chance to meet their sales and profitability goals. CSOs are investing heavily in technology-enabled selling – helping the sales team increase the return on time invested on the job. They are feeling behind their competition if they have not yet implemented an effective, current generation CRM application such as a Salesforce implementation for example. Most CSOs are now extending the value of their investment in CRM consulting by integrating CRM with both pre-packaged and custom-developed applications designed to improve marketing automation, sales incentive management, demand planning and forecasting and other business functions.