What are the factors that separate many of today’s top-performing B2B sales and marketing organisations from the rest? Having outstanding products and services that are truly relevant to a well-defined target audience is clearly important. But when you look at the factors that truly separate the fastest growing vendors from the rest, it’s often their ability to execute that really impresses. They have the ability to align their entire sales and marketing organisation around a common set of winning strategies and tactics.
My own experience – together with a body of research by the Harvard Business Review, the Aberdeen Group, Sirius Decisions, CSO Insights and others – consistently throws out a dozen key initiatives that seem to be particularly effective – when they are applied in an integrated fashion – in establishing a repeatable, scalable and high performing sales and marketing machine.
I’ve captured the factors in more detail in our latest guide to “12 Key Initiatives that could accelerate your revenue growth” – you can download a copy here (no registration required), but in summary, here they are:
- Identifying your ideal customers and prospects
- Understanding your key stakeholders’ concerns and motivations
- Capturing the key trends and issues affecting your prospects
- Identifying your prospects’ key trigger events
- Actively participating in business social media
- Establishing a consensus about “sales ready leads”
- Applying consistent sales opportunity qualification
- Implementing a structured and repeatable sales process
- Adopting dynamic sales pipeline management
- Applying consistent standards for sales forecasting
- Continuous reinforcement of sales training
- Maximising CRM user enthusiasm and adoption
Each initiative by itself has the potential to have an important impact on an key aspect of your sales and marketing performance. But they have a powerful multiplier effect when they are combined together.
I’d encourage you to review your own organisation’s current performance in these 12 areas – and to come up with an action plan for the areas where you can see some scope for improvement.
You may find it helpful to take our online B2B Sales + Marketing Health Check, which reviews each of these important areas plus a number of other significant performance areas. Please download the guide, take the test, and let me know what you think. Have I missed out any significant areas?
