What we do | Sales GoTo Market View | Better Digital Sales Teams
Better Digital Sales Teams
As Inside Sales moved beyond the telephone, digital sales took shape. Digital Sales is used to describe the mechanism for customer engagement through the power and possibilities of technology.
Advanced analytics now provide organizations with the ability to marry data from multiple sources and utilize intelligent algorithms to define the specific parameters for the next sales call. This closed loop approach is improving call connectivity ratios, as well as reducing the cost of sales by a fair margin.
Our engagements in Building Better Digital Sales Teams include the following.
Orchestrating Wins in Digital Sales
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When the external environment is volatile, your customers’ perception of risk becomes higher. This results in the multiplication of the number of stakeholders involved in any decision.
For sellers, the increased complexity of stakeholder identification and navigation can sometimes be daunting. To add to this mix, enterprise sales organizations have invested in several specialist sales roles that include technical sales, solution sales, industry sales, partner sales etc.
The ability to orchestrate internally, externally and across the channel partner eco-system becomes a vital capability for sales organizations to thrive in the new abnormal.
Our Approach
- With awareness comes choice, and clarity in choices drives focused action.
- The first step in stakeholder management is awareness and identification of who is involved from the customer’s side and more importantly why are they involved.
- Every person is motivated by self-interest. They may talk about organizational outcomes, but their decision making is driven by their personal motivators.
- The art of customer stakeholder management lies in the seller’s ability to sequence their focus on customer stakeholder identification and management.
- If time is the greatest leveler, then sales professionals need to understand how to best focus their time for maximum impact across stakeholders.
- The greatest problem assailing teamwork is the assumption of alignment. Therefore, there exists a need to design a set of transparent deliverables and expectations, which then becomes the foundation for internal orchestration.
- When sales professionals work in teams, the need to establish standards for synergy becomes imperative. A discussion on how they could become force multipliers among themselves could be a game changer that gains digital sales teams a greater share of their addressable market.
Impact driven for customers
Most digital sales orchestration engagements are custom designed, and typically involve critical internal and external stakeholders. The best engagements are those that blend internal planning and orchestration, with external (customer) strategy and execution.
In sales environments, either the account or the opportunity is kept at the center to learn team orchestration. Teams who go through our exercises, more often share, that this is perhaps their first time, when they have strategically come together, to consciously plan for their customer.
They are surprised how much every person can contribute, and how little every person engages and shares. Although global team orchestration guidance exists within large multinationals, there is no “in-market” orchestration agreement that is defined, leading to suboptimal execution.
Our internal orchestration workshops expose the pleasures and pains of collaboration, while also offering inspiration to synergize to achieve more.
Our workshops with customers sometimes expose the lack of visibility with senior decision makers, and a clear stakeholder management strategy, that includes key stakeholder types like mobilizers.
Typical results experienced by customers:
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Greater clarity and alignment with responsibility and accountability clearly defined, within the internal teams.
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A definition and strategy for customer stakeholder management with defined ownership to drive for results.
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An execution rhythm that involves constant communication and periodic collaboration to further the customer’s agenda.
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Greater awareness of competition and their activities
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A sense of collective ownership and pride, that defines their collective successes.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers to build multimillion-dollar pipelines for one of the largest enterprise business software companies.
The enterprise team of one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world discovered a need to significantly improve the quality of their pipeline. In addition, they needed their managers to improve their coaching skills so that they could drive sustenance within the business. These two requirements needed to be combined and they reached out to Tripura Multinational to fulfil these two goals.
As part of this engagement, we decided to use coaching as the fulcrum for change. We led by example on the first account plan as the entire team got together to be coached. All the sales managers observed this demonstration of coaching to understand the finer nuances of coaching, facilitation and project management. The art of asking hard questions in a soft way, structuring the conversation towards specific outcomes and facilitating everybody’s contribution and ownership to the process were key take-aways by the managers.
For the next account, one of the sales managers had to step up and replicate what they had observed earlier using their own style of facilitation and coaching. This dance of observation and application provided each manager with a tremendous opportunity to step out of their comfort zone and bring out the best in their account teams.
With this customer, around $125 Million dollars of net new revenue was identified (globally, the same methodology has been used to generate over $5Billion of net new potential opportunities world-wide). In addition to the discovery of the pipeline, the managers were also coached to stay accountable to the qualification, acceleration and closure of the pipeline as well. Within the first three months, this initiative yielded an additional $8 million of revenue which could not have happened without this engagement. Moreover, this methodology has been leveraged by each of the managers to coach each of their account teams to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of net new pipeline.
Recommended Resources for Orchestrating Your Team.
