Building A Sales Factory

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White Paper From The PivotalForce

Building A Sales Factory

Redefining The Scope Of Sales Execution

Reinventing The Road Map To High Performance


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Section 1: Sales Factory – Driving Operating And Market Performance

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write

but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Alvin Toffler

Every high tech market has a competitive landscape that spans a mix of powerful leaders, successful

followers, emerging challengers, irrelevant survivors and one-hit wonders. Take a close look at any

market and the competitors often have similar visions, products and architectures. Yet for all the

similarities, there is an enormous gap in operating and market performance.

It’s clear that top companies fire on multiple cylinders. But, it’s is equally clear that there is a

pivotal force that drives high-performance companies. Contrary to the industry’s long-standing

overreliance on technology, sales execution is that force, separating sustained from sporadic

performance and market leaders from market followers.

Yet for all its impact, CEO and board frustration with sales execution spans companies of every

size, stage and market. All-too-often, performance falls short of plan, growth lags key competitors,

market influence is non-existent and ineffective spending consumes capital and kills profitability.

Far too many companies have squandered great opportunities and lots of capital solely because their

sales execution was somewhere south of mediocre. Sometimes, really far south of mediocre.

While there is a unique slant to every company’s sales execution problem, there is also a common

thread. With astounding frequency, instinctual forces dominate the agenda. Great instincts are

irreplaceable but they aren’t enough. High tech vendors also need a structure that defines the

broad scope of sales execution, unifies the equally broad array of strategic, talent and operating and

capabilities and drives sustained execution.

The Performance Levers shown in Figure 1 convert the Strategic Goals into operating reality.

Spanning a career that has produced $2 billon in enterprise revenue and the insight gained working

with the best companies and most talented people in the industry, I’m absolutely convinced that

they are the eight core priorities that change an organization’s operating and market performance.

They span the entire organization, as dependent on executive and marketing leadership as the sales

team. The breadth can seem overwhelming but they aren’t optional and there are no shortcuts.

High-performance sales execution

begins with understanding its scope.

The myopic view that equates it with

deal management and measures it

solely by performance vs. the ops plan

underestimates impact and undermines

the critical capabilities needed for

success. The right scope has two key

dimensions, spanning the Strategic

Goals and key priorities shown in

Figure 1. The goals should be driven

by the broader view that sales

execution is at the core of operating

performance, customer creation, scale

and market leadership.


The key question is how to make the Performance Levers far less overwhelming and far more

operational. For many vendors, the missing ingredient is a structure that combines the power of

those instinctual talents with strategic clarity and precision execution. That structure is the

Sales Operating Model® (SOM) and it’s designed for B2B vendors that sell products with complex

customer acquisition, retention and expansion cycles.

The SOM, as shown in Figure 2, unifies the four capabilities of sales execution. Go-To-Market

Strategy is at the heart of the SOM, producing an explicit road map that directs the organization.

Talent unites sales and marketing into a high-performance team. Precision Marketing creates the

identity, content, programs and relationships that arm the sales force for victory. Precision Sales

builds an engine to excel at transaction management, highlighted at the far right of Figure 2.

There’s a bigger issue in play than simply fixing sales execution. The SOM transforms the

organization from sporadic greatness to a sales factory. Thinking about sales and marketing as a

factory, while alien to many leaders, is a powerful tool to drive superior, sustained and predictable

performance with the right cost structure. It’s a big job but the market does not reward vendors for

doing most things right, it rewards them for doing everything right.

A critical part of that transformation is responding to fundamental shifts in customer buying

dynamics that have, in turn, had an equally fundamental impact on vendor selling economics. The

sales execution game has radically changed, yet many companies cling to legacy sales models,

designed for a market that no longer exists. Producing the numbers in today’s market is every bit as

much about selling differently as it is selling better. The structure, breadth and innovation of the

SOM provides the road map to do both. To be clear, the SOM does not mean bureaucracy, nor does it confuse process with purpose.

Rather, it’s all about creating a pivotal force that combines the right amount of structure with the

vision, technical leadership, creative genius and relentless drive to succeed that are the DNA of the

high tech industry. Call it the intersection of the art and science of selling to deliver game-changing

improvements to the way deals are managed, markets are won and careers are built.


Section 2: Creating Customers – Acquire Rapidly, Expand Profitably

“There is only one valid business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is

the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.” Peter Drucker

To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the purpose of sales execution is to create customers. A large and

well-penetrated customer base is at the heart of a high-performance sales organization. Everything

a vendor does, from building products to creating market awareness and managing deals, should be

done to drive the rapid acquisition and profitable retention of a large customer base.

Customer creation should be an obsession for every high tech vendor. Bookings, revenue, margins

and market share all flow from an engine that continually and profitably identifies, engages,

acquires and upsells a large customer base in a clearly defined target market. While that is

seemingly obvious in principle, it is surprisingly absent in practice. Many vendors don’t establish

customer creation as a strategic goal and acquisition and penetration rates are not measured.

Compounding the challenge, the customer creation game has changed. Driven by powerful market

forces such as technical innovation, disruptive business models, shifts in IT strategy and reduced

rates of budget growth, customers have reengineered how they evaluate, purchase and deploy

technology. As a result, sales cycles are more complex, transactional patterns radically different

and costs as a percentage of GAAP revenue far higher.

The key takeaway from Figure 3 is that customer creation is not a single event. Instead, it spans

eight distinct stages, each requiring equally distinct vendor deliverables. The pivotal force that

makes it all possible is customer acquisition, which for most vendors is a huge challenge. The four

stages of customer acquisition, shown on the right side of Figure 3, make it complex. Prospect

inertia and tenacious competitors make it difficult. Shifts in customer buying dynamics make it

expensive. But that doesn’t matter. Market leaders make customer acquisition a core competency.

At the core of the shift is a lifecycle

that redefines customer creation. In the

not-so-distant past, customer creation

largely equated to winning the initial

deal. The ‘big bang’ model with large

upfront contracts, long deployment

cycles and high switching costs

provided a platform for long-term

account control. But, as shown in

Figure 3, today’s lifecycle has distinct

acquisition, expansion and retention

stages. The ‘big bang’ model has been

replaced by a multi-year transactional

cycle with a series of larger and more

profitable deals, representing both

threat and opportunity to every vendor.


Customer acquisition is the growth engine, adding new logos in the short-term and building a large

installed base to be developed in the long-term. The SOM has three key principles that drive

customer acquisition:

1. The customer lifecycle is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model: The communication programs,

product packaging and coverage models that are needed to acquire a new customer differ

from those that retain and expand the relationship.

2. The emerging ‘consumerization’ of enterprise selling is changing the game: Vendors must

build a rapid evaluation, purchase, deployment and value creation model that accelerates

time to contract, successful deployment and expansion deals.

3. Create a Transformational Value Proposition: Every prospect has architectural and political

barriers that impede new vendors and the trite “we have the best product in the history of the

western hemisphere” is seldom enough to win the initial deal. Vendors need to create a

compelling value proposition that makes the deal a ‘no-brainer’ to sign.

Customer retention and expansion, shown in the left side of Figure 3, is the vendor’s profit engine.

The big payoff occurs when the initial scope is expanded, the solution footprint diversified and

architectural standards established. But it’s far from automatic, requiring a foundation of successful

deployments, proactive communication campaigns and a coverage model that smothers the account.

Spotlight: Category Leadership – Expand Category To Accelerate Growth

High tech vendors should never underestimate the importance of being in a category. The market

budgets and purchases in categories such as ERP, database, servers, routers and consulting services

and has no money for ‘next-generation’ anything. Scaling the business requires competing in a

‘must-have’ category that users can intuitively link to and analysts can measure.

The category in which to compete and the role the vendor wants to play are ‘bet the company’

decisions. The three options are to differentiate within an existing category, redefine its ground

rules or create a new category. Across that spectrum, every vendor has an opportunity to

evangelize on the category’s impact, which is massively different from a sales pitch. Establishing

thought leadership will increase category relevance and accelerate adoption rates, creating a

powerful, but often underestimated, growth lever.

Having been a part of many early-stage

markets, I know that an ill-defined

category is a dominant factor in the

‘Wall of Adoption’ that slows growth

and sabotages business plans. Having

been a part of four category creation

efforts (three were successful), I also

know that shaping a category is a huge,

but doable effort, with a reasonably

repeatable road map that is shown in

Figure 4. The key lesson learned is it’s

not a category until analysts say it’s a

category. That requires a potent mix

of vision, vocal customers, content

and a strong ecosystem.


Section 3: Strategy By Design, Not Default

“Strategy is about making choices. It’s about deliberately choosing

to be different." Michael Porter

When a company misses plan or loses market share, the usual assumption is that they have a sales

execution problem. It took a while but I finally figured out that what looks like a field execution

problem is often a strategy problem. Or, more commonly, the lack of a strategy that drives

sustained operating, market and capital performance.

I see this problem in vendors of every size, stage and market. Every company has sales reps, deals

in the pipeline and a CRM system. Throw in a web site, positioning statement and a few webinars

and vendors think they have a strategy when, in fact, it’s often nothing more than a mishmash of

loosely-connected activities. To use an American football analogy, it’s like a quarterback calling

the ‘everybody out for a pass’ play – the team is certainly busy but it’s also misdirected, misaligned

and unproductive.

Strategy is at the heart of the SOM. It starts with bringing clarity to the often confusing question of

what actually constitutes a go-to-market-strategy. It is not simply a goal (e.g. “our strategy is to be

the market leader”) or a financial plan. Rather, it is an explicit and differentiated road map that

produces financial and competitive advantage. Strategic clarity is achieved when the plan is

communicated to, aligned with and embraced by the team.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the strategy/execution path linkage. I am convinced

that there is no such thing as a good strategy that is poorly executed – there are simply good

strategies that produce desired results and bad strategies that don’t. That’s why the SOM is

unmistakably execution centric – or, more accurately, precision execution centric. I don’t use the

term as a hollow buzzword, but with specific criteria that are absolutely required to build a sales

factory. It must be strategy driven, aligned with a complete set of programs and tools, guided by

relentless consistency and supported by an institutionalized review process. A bit wordy perhaps

but each component plays a key role in winning the execution war.

The Go-To-Market Strategy Model is

shown in Figure 5. It unifies the

Strategic Profile and Ops Plan with

the execution path, spanning selling

and marketing strategies. Effective

strategy starts with aligning goals,

market attractiveness, execution

capabilities and the ideal market.

Assessing execution capabilities and

gaps is a key, but often overlooked

step. The high tech industry does not

lack for audacious visions but unless

execution gaps are identified and

obliterated, the goals are often more

delusional than audacious.


Section 4: Building The Right Team – Much More Than Just The People

“Culture is what people do when no one is looking.” Lou Gerstner

Having had the privilege of working with several great companies, I learned that there is no

substitute for talent. Without exception, every high-performance company that I have worked for,

consulted with or competed against has a common thread of relentless commitment to building an

‘A’ team. The compelling visions, creative positioning, great products and perfect business controls

mean nothing unless the right team is in place.

Great talent doesn’t magically happen – it must be recruited, developed, aligned, compensated,

managed and led. High-performance companies hire the right people in the right jobs at the right

time. That means they tailor the team to the company’s stage, size, market, culture and leadership.

Talent isn’t always portable. We’ve all seen people produce big numbers at one company but fall

short of plan at others, often because the skills and traits that drive success vary significantly across

organizational and market maturity.

Spotlight: Building The ‘A’ Team

Culture plays a key role in building an ‘A’ team and has a huge impact on both organizational and

individual performance. Strong cultures are created by design, rooted in the DNA of the company

and continually reinforced by compensation, performance management and a unified leadership

team. They create a powerful competitive advantage in the form of a more talented, unified and

aligned team that delivers far better operating performance.

Contrary to cynical opinion, culture is not about holding hands and singing kumbaya. The reality is

market leaders usually have demanding cultures. With astounding consistency, they have high

expectations for every member of the team, creating what I call a culture of consequences in which

performance is both rewarded and celebrated and failures are rapidly fixed. In turn, that drives a

predatory nature, creating an expectation of ‘100% market share.’ Quite simply, these companies

expect to crush competitors, win every deal and dominate every market.

Falling into the category of great

lessons, Dave Dyer, one of the best

sales execs in the industry, taught me

that there is a big difference between

hiring ‘A’ players and having an ‘A’

team. Great teams are much more

than just the people – they are

created by everything that surrounds

them. Figure 6 shows the key factors,

spanning alignment, culture, training,

performance expectations, leadership

and compensation that combine to

drive productivity and performance

to far higher levels.


Section 5: Precision Marketing – Fixing The Weakest Link

“The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of

your products, more often, for more money.” Sergio Zyman

A core principle of the SOM is that marketing is an essential part of building a sales factory.

Superior, sustained and predictable performance, with the right cost structure, demands that high-

priced sales team are sent into battle with the tools needed to crush competitors, win deals and

dominate markets. Even the best sales force cannot overcome dreadful or non-existent marketing.

Unfortunately, marketing – both strategic and tactical – is underfunded, ignored and mangled by far

too many companies. Candidly, there are good reasons why CEOs and Boards don’t trust or fund

marketing. All-too-often, it is disconnected from revenue generation, weak positioning kills the

brand, a hodgepodge of demand generation programs increase costs but deliver no leads and metrics

are non-existent. But, there is never a good reason not to fix marketing.

It’s impossible to build a great marketing organization without budget. Vision and strategy are

occasionally free but content, ecosystems and demand generation cost money. I stress this because

marketing is often underfunded, inevitably leading to low sales force productivity, false starts and

missed operating plans. If budget is tight, fund marketing by delaying an ill-timed sales force

expansion until the company is ready to support and sustain the attack.

Market Insight

The marketing value chain begins with building deep market insight. Many companies are ‘vision-

heavy but insight-light’, meaning they rely far too much on the leader’s vision and passion and not

enough on understanding solution requirements, user perceptions, category maturity, market size,

competitive landscape, analyst views and trends.

The essence of differentiation is solution positioning, packaging and selling messages within the

context of broader market forces. That insight can only be gained outside the company, listening to

customers, prospects, analysts and the ecosystem and studying the competition. Building deep

market insight is neither complex nor expensive but it does require a rigorous and continuous

process and the willingness to occasionally challenge the proverbial ‘sacred cows’.

The goal of marketing is to create the

identity, content, relationships and

programs that arm the sales force for

victory. There’s no doubt that vision

and creative genius play a key role but

they aren’t enough. When instinctual

talents are combined with the right plan

and skills to produce a broad set of

tools, marketing is transformed into an

output machine. As shown in Figure 7,

that’s what Precision Marketing is all

about with insight and differentiated

strategies driving the four components

of a world-class Marketing Platform.


Spotlight: Market Prioritization – Invest In Lucrative And Winnable Markets

Market prioritization is a critical strategy that focuses the organization and optimizes investments in

lucrative and winnable markets. Its importance and granularity are often underestimated, resulting

in a market definition that lacks clarity, consistency and alignment with the company’s strengths.

Spotlight: Positioning Architecture – Create An Aura Of Leadership

The #1 CEO complaint that I hear is “no one knows who we are,” an often lethal problem that is

always rooted in weak positioning. To be clear, I think positioning in the high tech market is really,

really bad. All-too-often, it is complex, utterly forgettable, ever-changing and poorly differentiated.

Creating positioning is really hard work. It’s tough to balance audacity and credibility, simplicity

and substance. And, building consensus – a vital step in creating a One Company, One Message

identity – always presents a unique set of challenges. But, it is not optional. The market simply

will not invest the time to understand how a poorly positioned solution, from a company they have

never heard of, in an irrelevant category, will deliver value.

The goal of positioning is to craft a

compelling and differentiated identity

that creates an aura of leadership.

That’s a tall order in markets that

suffer from information overload and

skepticism. But it’s a critical growth

lever. Users want to buy from leaders.

The ecosystem wants to partner with

leaders. ‘A’ players want to work for

leaders. As shown in Figure 9, there is

an architecture to create category,

solution and company positioning,

which spans and unifies the story,

content, solution packaging and field

selling messages.

As the old saying goes: in the battle

between the bear and the alligator, the

terrain determines the victor. Market

prioritization gives every company the

opportunity to define its terrain in the

form of a tightly and completely

defined target market. Figure 8 shows

the six components that go far beyond

simply identifying a target industry or

size of company criterion. A critical,

but often ignored step, is a market

database that is the foundation of

customer creation and one of the

organization’s most valuable assets.


Spotlight: Demand Generation Strategy – Arming The Sales Team With Leads

Great positioning is the front end of the solution to the CEO’s “no one knows who we are” concern.

Part 2 is a Demand Generation Strategy that converts the aura of leadership into awareness, interest

and preference. Erratic or non-existent demand generation sabotages performance, leaving vendors

without an identity, an ecosystem lacking the incentive to partner and a sales force facing a constant

uphill battle to build its pipeline.

Demand generation is a potent combination of message, content and delivery to truly engage the

market. Boring messages won’t cut it and simply creating awareness is not enough. For most

companies, demand generation requires a transformation built on four major principles:

1. Culture of continuous communication: Engaging the market is as dependent on culture as it

is creative genius. Sporadic and event-driven business promotion programs are useless and

must be replaced by continuous communications from both the marketing and sales teams.

2. Unified and sequenced communications platform: Establishing a strong and differentiated

market position absolutely requires a communications platform that unifies the message,

sequence, frequency, delivery mode, call-to-action, desired response and follow-up.

3. Audacity: Demand generation is not for the faint-hearted. Companies need big goals, an

audacious message and passionate conviction to put the company on the map.

4. The ecosystem matters: Establishing a strong market position in today’s crowded IT market

is not a solo sport. Analysts, SIs and technology and channel partners play a key role in

delivering the message through every channel and to every touch point.

Marketing Platform

The Marketing Platform creates an output machine that arms the sales team with tools to build large

pipelines, accelerate sales cycles and increase win rates. This machine runs on content. Studies

show that 60% of B2B buying decisions are made prior to vendor meetings, which means buyers

are collecting information from diverse sources and forming vendor perceptions long before the first

PowerPoint is shown. The Marketing Platform creates and distributes content to ensure those

perceptions are both accurate and positive.

The Marketing Platform, as shown in

Figure 10, creates and distributes

content that is rooted in clarity (fluff is

out!!), intrigue and graphical appeal.

Selling content must be tied to and

improve the customer lifecycle. The

digital platform is at the center of a

vendor’s identity, spanning web and

social systems. MarComm drives

continuous outbound communications

and Lead Gen creates demand and

intercepts active evaluations. Strong

analyst/ecosystem relationships are a

vital factor in driving high engage and

win rates.


Section 6: Precision Sales – It’s All About Transaction Management

“This isn’t the professional golf tour. We don’t get paid

to come in second.” Rick Page

The SOM is clearly focused (some have said ‘obsessed’ is a better word) with arming the sales team

for victory. Hiring an expensive sales force and not creating the tools – or worse yet, expecting

sales reps to build their own – is guaranteed path to undermine revenue and bookings productivity.

Factories are fueled by ‘raw materials’ and the sales factory is no different.

Selling Strategy

Selling strategies are all about the when and the how – when is the market ready to be attacked,

when is the right time to expand the sales team, how is the target market defined and covered, how

to drive and accelerate performance. The when issues often represent the most important decision a

high tech vendor faces because it requires the biggest capital commitment. Hiring and supporting a

sales force is a big bet and should be made only when the market, product and organizational

capabilities are ready for prime time.

As shown in Figure 11, the SOM has four core selling strategies that drive and unify field ops.

Each has multiple components with several viable options that must be tailored to the vendor’s

goals, market forces and capabilities. Strategy is a White Paper unto itself so in the interest of

brevity, I will offer a summary:

1. Sales Model: The sales model is the blueprint for how the organization attacks the market

and manages transactions. Key components include target market definition, organizational

structure, roles, channels, transactional ownership and the quota and comp models.

That should not be taken as a get-out-

of-jail-card-free for the sales team.

Virtually every sales organization can

take their game to a higher level. Rick

Page, a friend, mentor and high tech

industry sales legend, gives a great

reminder that sales is all about winning.

Precision Selling, shown in Figure 11,

is the pivotal force that makes winning

a habit. It is the road map that aligns

powerful instinctual forces with talent,

strategy and sales ops to excel at

transaction management. An engine

that continually builds a large pipeline,

increases win rates, expands customer

penetration and produces reliable

forecasts is the ultimate game-changer.


2. Revenue Model: The Revenue Model defines the pricing position and structure, multi-year

bookings, revenue and cash flow cycles, sales rep productivity model and product-line

discounting.

3. Sales Methodology: Ask ten people what a deal methodology is and you will probably get

eight different answers. I define it as a framework of insights, steps, resources and selling

tools that improve transaction management. It’s important to stress that it is not a rigid

sequence of events, but rather, a framework that transforms deal management from ‘one-off

wonders’ to an execution engine.

4. Target Addressable Market (TAM) Expansion: Top performers are continually looking to

expand into new and bigger markets. The six TAM expansion options are to compete in

new market segments, industries or geographies, broaden channels, increase the solution

footprint or change the solution linkage to a higher value business or technical issue.

Spotlight: Total Market Coverage – The #1 Growth Lever

Total Market Coverage (TMC) combines demand generation programs and the sales model with

relentless and proactive territory development efforts to create a pipeline that supports the operating

plan, build relationships with High-Value Targets and establish a lead position in the early stages of

every deal. In my experience, this is sales execution’s #1 point of failure, with vendors falling into

one of three TMC categories – oblivious, erratic or systematic.

The impact of weak pipelines – which are too small, with the wrong prospects and fluctuate wildly –

often takes a backseat to the more visible win rate metrics for active deals. But, ‘opening’ deals is

a far bigger challenger than closing them and it offers far more upside. To illustrate, a company

with 5% market share and 67% deal win rate engages only 7.5% of their market. Said another way,

92% of the market’s total spend happens without their involvement, and in many cases, without

their knowledge. Pipeline expansion programs are an often underestimated, but potent growth

lever.

There should be no doubt that world-

class TMC requires a systematic

approach. As shown in Figure 12, it

is built on the fundamentals –

coverage models, segmented account

lists, marketing programs, continuous

communications and relentless activity

– from both the corporate and field

sales teams. Most importantly, create

a compelling reason-to-meet that is as

important as the compelling reason-

to-buy. Develop a potent message that

opens doors and give it to the market

multiple times and through multiple

touch points.


Spotlight: Deal Management – CS6X Methodology

In no area of sales execution is there a smaller margin of error than deal management. There is often

a razor-thin difference separating success and failure across the trifecta of great deal management –

winning the deal, at the expected price point and in the expected timeframe.

The reasons for that small margin of error are varied. External barriers abound in the form of

demanding customers, tough competitors, mercurial ecosystems and economic headwinds. There is

absolutely no reason to compound the challenge by managing every deal as a ‘one-off’. While deal

management is far from a rigid process, there is a cadence, an essential group of insights,

deliverables and relationships that are vital to consistently win enterprise deals. The sequence and

importance will vary but the requirements will be astoundingly consistent.

The key principles behind the CS6X Methodology are:

1. Forget about scripting sales cycles: Sales methodologies often fail because they are a weak

response to a poorly-defined problem. Attempts to enforce a rigid selling cycle or script

everything the sales team does simply won’t work for enterprise deals. Rather, the focus

should be on building the insights, tools and resources that win each of the six sales.

2. It’s the plane you don’t see that shoots you down: CS6X is rooted in the paranoia that deals

are lost or incorrectly forecasted far more often because something is missed than because it

is done poorly. Create and institutionalize a structured deal planning process for every high-

value deal, with coaching and input from both sales management and the account team.

3. Perfect Deal Knowledge creates the separation: Deals are won or lost in the Discovery

phase, we just happen to get the news much later in the cycle. Total insight into the

prospect, project and power base improves qualification, win rates and forecast accuracy.

4. Broaden evaluations beyond the ‘product bake-off’: Technology dominates too many

evaluations. It’s ‘strategy 101’ for prospects as they seek to commoditize the buying process

and most vendors are happy to play along since showing off functionality and architectures

is the DNA of the industry. But, it’s the other sales that determine the winner – vendors

must broaden the evaluation criteria and their differentiators across each of the six sales.

No White Paper is complete without

an acronym or two and mine is CS6X.

It is a sales methodology driven by

the market reality that enterprise

deals should be viewed and managed

as six distinct sales. CS6X is a very

broad topic, and in the spirit of full

disclosure, I can’t give away all my

secrets in a free White Paper. As

shown in Figure 13, CS6X starts with

an often overlooked sale – the vitally

important Discovery step – followed

by five distinct sales, focused on

multiple Buying Centers, that convert

a pipeline into qualified opportunities

and closed deals.


5. Broaden coverage across all Buying Centers: In my experience, the biggest deal

management change in recent years is that more Buying Centers – departments, economic

buyers, users and external influencers – impact vendor selection than ever before. Decision

making now fragments across the prospect’s organization and increasingly goes far beyond

the IT department. The lack of insight into and support from a key Buying Center is often

the difference between winning and losing deals or, just as harsh, a forecasted deal that is

delayed and slides into the next quarter.

Sales Operations

Sales infrastructure becomes increasingly important as the organization scales. Establishing a

strong Sales Operations function is a key part of improving both performance and predictability. It

covers territory and quota management, SFA systems, forecast management, training and contract

processing.

The right level of infrastructure varies. Early-stage companies often benefit from an operating

environment with a liberal dose of ‘creative chaos’ as they experiment with the best formula to

build or expand market momentum. Regardless of size or stage, clearly defining SFA system usage

and definitions will improve reporting and forecast accuracy.

A Final Thought – Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast

The good news is sales execution is fixable. Rapidly fixable. The better news is we’re not facing

monumental complexity. That’s not to say it’s easy. Obliterating historical weaknesses,

recognizing that fundamental market shifts have changed the game, challenging the sacred ‘art of

sales’ doctrine and the discipline to add the right amount of structure present significant barriers.

But, there should be no doubt that clinging to legacy sales models is a guaranteed path to being, at

best, an irrelevant survivor. Producing the numbers in today’s market is every bit as much about

selling differently as it is selling better. With no claim of objectivity, I believe the structure, breadth

and innovation of the SOM provides the road map to do both.

I’m often asked what is the best way to implement the SOM. My answer is always the same –

think big, start small, move fast. I recognize that the SOM can be overwhelming, in large part

because sales execution itself is overwhelming in scope and impact. I hate to admit it, but figuring

out easy solutions to mission-critical challenges is above my pay grade. For most companies, the

key is to ‘think big’ – define organizational goals, identify the priorities, build an execution road

map – but ‘start small’, getting early and quick wins. Then ‘move fast’ to the major priorities that

will transform the organization into a sales factory.

The instinctual forces that drive the ‘art of sales’ and the ‘art of marketing’ will always be an

essential part of high-performance sales execution. But, the pivotal force is created when they are

combined with the structure of the SOM, delivering game-changing improvements to the way deals

are managed, markets are won and careers are built.

John Keenan

214.620.6280

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

Documents

Building A Sales Factory