What we do | Sales Segment View | Enterprise Sales Leadership
Enterprise Sales Leadership
Customer segmentation dictates sales strategy and engagement. While the fundamentals of sales process, discipline and execution remains the same, the nature of engagement becomes different across different segments.
For our various offerings, we follow a depth and breadth approach depending upon the segment of customers you would like to address.
In the case of the enterprise segment, we go deep to discover the depth and detail that can make you distinct and differentiated in your customer engagements.
Irrespective of the segment for your customers, our range of offerings will build your set of capabilities for you to retire market potential faster.
Coaching Multi-Million $ pipeline generation
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One of the dysfunctions that sales leaders constantly complain about is the tick box exercise of Account Planning. This is often seen as a Q1 exercise to be completed by the end of Q1 to gain a certain level of pipeline sufficiency. Some leaders say their teams ask them how much pipeline they require so that they could “stuff” their pipeline with enough ghost opportunities to meet their account planning goals. There must be a different way!
Our Approach
- Planning happens best through the interplay of divergent and convergent thinking.
- The admission of ignorance is the beginning of learning.
- Thinking “outside in” is a powerful way to connect the dots from the customer to the seller.
- An environment of positivity and possibility helps everyone deliver more.
- Getting the sales team to integrate and collaborate is crucial to a greater outcome in account planning.
- An account plan without customer validation and stakeholder triangulation is hallucination.
How can your sales managers coach to generate multimillion-dollar pipelines?
A benchmark is important for every individual to assess their gap from their current version of performance to the standards required for excellence. Our engagement delivers a benchmark across three levels:
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The quality and depth of information needed for any account
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The quality of coaching and facilitation required for running a planning session
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The quality of validation and triangulation required for any account plan
Our facilitator leads by example on group coaching of the account planning session, post which one of the sales managers demonstrates their capability to do the same. Multiple iterations of observations and applications across industries builds the core strength of managers to coach towards powerful account planning outcomes.
Impact driven for customers
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Coached hundreds of Account Planning sessions and empowered hundreds of sales managers to generate over $4billion dollars of net-new pipeline.
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These engagements have covered over 20 different countries across 5 different continents, which is a testament to the effectiveness of this framework across different cultures. There are no excuses for not coaching powerful account plans.
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Smart customers build the operational discipline to track net-new opportunities generated right through qualification, acceleration and closure.
One of our customers, who identified $125 million net-new opportunities through our engagement was surprised to realize $8 million dollars of closed opportunities, through this process, within a quarter.
Imagine, how much more you could drive for your sales organization through us.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for You.
Deal acceleration in sales depends on building a customer-centric culture by creating value
Deal acceleration in sales depends on building a customer-centric culture by creating value
Designing a Better 3-Year Sales Plan
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Our Approach
- Organization structure and hierarchy should not be replicated for three-year planning processes.
- To think outside the box, you need to look into other boxes.
- Measure yourself by not what you have achieved in the past, but by how much of your addressable market you have retired?
- Diversity is the foundation for a strong three-year plan.
- Simplicity with sophistication should form the structure of the planning process.
- Any planning without critical stakeholder validation and triangulation, is hallucination.
How do we engage with you for your three-year planning exercise?
We start by designing an engagement roadmap that includes the planning team (ideally not more than 25 leaders). Good planning requires good preparation, and some preparation guidelines are sent out prior so that data is readily available to substantiate the planning. If possible, we would prefer an offsite location that helps bring together the mind, body, heart, and soul for the leaders. We facilitate a series of experiences that help the leaders understand each other better and leverage their differences to achieve more for their vision.
In some cases, we leverage our partnership with MarketCulture to assess the level of customer centricity within the leadership team. Leaders measure their organizational focus across eight different parameters that also helps them benchmark themselves against the best in class. This assessment has proved to be very useful as a pre-cursor to the planning exercise.
Clients who have experienced our facilitated three-year planning approach are surprised by how much they are able to achieve within two days. They are also surprised how the richness of the engagement helps them sustain the planning efforts into execution and results.
Customer Results - Case Study
Ensuring 3-year plans deliver results – “Failing to plan is planning to fail”
The Indonesia subsidiary of one of the world’s largest software multinationals wanted to develop a three-year plan that truly reflected market potential. Previous annual efforts had been mostly internally driven with lack luster follow-up and little progress in market share. They believed that a facilitated process would help them achieve more and they turned to Tripura to help them with the process.
We designed an engagement that allowed the top leaders to understand the divergent perspectives everybody had on the market and its potential. This helped them during the workshop to first decide on a common aspiration that everyone would feel inspired and motivated by. The next step was to ensure that leaders understood their similarities and differences so they could leverage their differences to achieve more for every project that supported their aspiration. We also took them through a series of experiences by which they were able to translate their vision into specific goals, strategies, metrics, measures, and milestones. We also leveraged Black Hat Thinking to identify future potential risks that need to be mitigated as the teams translated strategy into execution.
The subsidiary leader was surprised to see the quality of the output at the end of two days. This was far beyond their expectations, and it earned them appreciation from the Region for a higher order of aspiration, supported by a solid set of strategies. Their ability to have meaningful conversations with their regional leaders on investments and outcomes led to higher investment for the Indonesian subsidiary. The acceleration that they received on account of their strong strategies helped them front load their performance to such an extent that the Covid-19 crisis did not make a significant dent in their growth numbers.
Recommended Resources for Sales Planning
Q0 Planning: 5 Ways You Could Assess If You Have a Good Plan?
Q0 Planning: 5 Ways You Could Assess If You Have a Good Plan?
Self-Leadership in Enterprise Sales
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It is no surprise that sales managers are not provided all the skills and training that is required for them to maximize their effectiveness. There is an inherent assumption that they possess most of the sales management skills, which we are discovering is not necessarily true. In coaching thousands of sales managers over the past several years, we are constantly surprised about how they struggle with some of the basic management skills.
This background and experiences are the genesis for our offering.
Our Approach
- The greatest leveler is time. Management efficiency and leadership effectiveness is indexed around how sales managers plan and spend their time. Harmonizing their various roles to maximizing their effectiveness is key.
- The biggest single impediment to sales managers effectiveness is the “Expert’s Curse”. This is when sales managers start doing what their team members should be doing and start telling when they should be coaching.
- Technology exists to drive sales acceleration. The effectiveness of a sales manager lies in their ability to get technology to reflect “one version of the truth” and to gain hindsight, insights, and foresights from the data.
- The ability to appreciate and apply the principles and practices of change management can make a clear difference to the effectiveness of the sales manager.
How can your sales managers become world class?
Time is a fundamental constraint for sales managers and any engagement needs to be designed while respecting these constraints. Our engagements modularize the key capabilities that every sales manager should possess.
Modularization helps the sales manager appreciate the new normal for their skills and engage in different experiences that helps them imbibe and embed the new set of skills and behaviours that are relevant for the future.
Interactions with a sales coach who has also been a practitioner helps the sales managers contextualize their learnings better. Specific situations and challenges help the sales managers build situational fluency in their application of new knowledge.
This combination of modularization, customization and experimentation provides the rich environment for the sales manager to gain the foundational skills that would amplify their effectiveness.
Impact driven for customers
Sales managers who have benefitted from our programs and were promoted to the next level, tell us that their engagement with us has transformed them in many ways:
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They now know how to balance time, team, and talent to maximize productivity.
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Their meetings are far more effective on account of their ability to leverage technology and data to have deeper meaningful conversations.
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They have more time for their own leadership development due to their increased ability to situationally lead and coach their teams.
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The program has allowed them to overachieve on their commitments because of their increased ability to manage a better book of business.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for Enterprise Sales Leaders.
Demonstrating Authentic Leadership Everyday With Integrity, Respect And Purpose
Demonstrating Authentic Leadership Everyday With Integrity, Respect And Purpose
Internal and External Stakeholder Management and Orchestration
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When the external environment is volatile, an organizations 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 eco-system becomes a vital capability for sales organizations to thrive in the new abnormal.
Our Approach
- With awareness comes choice and the clarity of choices drives focused action.
- The first step in stakeholder management is awareness and identification of who is involved but more importantly why are they involved.
- Every person is motivated by self-interest. They may talk about organizational outcomes, but their decision making is biased by self-interest.
- The art of stakeholder management lies in the seller’s ability to sequence their focus for stakeholder management.
- Time is the greatest leveler, so 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, the need to design a set of transparent deliverables and expectations becomes important in the journey towards internal orchestration.
- When sales professionals work in teams, the ability to establish standards for synergy becomes important. A discussion on how they could become force multipliers among themselves could be the game changer to gain a greater share of addressable market.
Impact driven for customers
Most teaming engagements are custom designed and mostly involve critical internal and external stakeholders in the engagement. The best engagements are those that blend internal planning and orchestration with external strategy and execution.
In sales environments, either the account or the opportunity is kept at the center to allow for orchestration.
Teams who go through our exercises often share that this is the first time they have strategically come together to consciously plan for the customer.
They are surprised how much every person can contribute and how little they collaborate. Although global team orchestration guidance exists within large multinationals, there is no local 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 and achieve more.
Our orchestration workshops with customers sometimes exposes the lack of visibility with senior decision makers and a clear stakeholder management strategy that includes key stakeholders 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 Insights for Sales Managers.
Sales Manager Behaviours
Sales Manager Behaviours
Appreciating and Applying World Class Coaching
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The necessity to coach for a sales manager is never in doubt. However, sales professionals can sometimes suffer from poor or ineffective coaching from their managers. It is therefore incumbent upon organizations to provide sales managers with the right capabilities to become good coaches.
Our Approach
- Coaching is a journey and from a practitioner’s perspective, it moves from awareness to appreciation to application.
- Organizations expect their sales managers to coach but these managers themselves have not experienced the power of coaching.
- Therefore, it is imperative to provide sales managers with a coach who can get the sales manager to experience several “Aha moments” that triggers their understanding and appreciation of the power of coaching.
- The key to building sales managers as good coaches lies in their application of coaching. Whether it is with a team member, an internal stakeholder or a customer/ partner, their ability to coach across different audiences and teams becomes a core competency to build a coaching culture within the sales organization.
Impact driven for customers
Customers leverage this offering when they need to drive three types of outcomes:
- Build volume in their pipeline
- Build velocity for their deals
- Build quality in their execution and people management
Each of these scenarios involve existing accounts, deals or teams through whom managers need to operate to add greater value to customers.
A typical application scenario for coaching involves a pre-brief to decide on the objectives and outcomes for the manager. The objectives and outcomes differ depending upon whether the target for coaching is either a team member, an entire team, or the customer/partner.
The second phase involves the actual application of coaching through their demonstration of the principles of coaching. Their efficacy in establishing a climate for coaching, their ability to structure conversations to powerful realizations and their ability to drive towards outcomes are all tested in the application scenario. This is when managers realize the gap between the appreciation and application of coaching.
The third step involves a debrief between the sales manager and coach on their mutual observations, blind-spots, areas of improvement etc. Multiple iterations of such applications of coaching, is what helps managers to build and sustain a coaching habit.
Organizations that have invested in building a coaching habit have been observed to showcase significant increases in pipeline volume, deal velocity and seller productivity.
2X increases in volume and velocity are not uncommon.
Customer Results - Case Study
Coaching Sales Managers across Asia to appreciate and apply the power of coaching for sustained sales performance.
One of the world’s largest software companies decided to establish an inside (digital) sales team across Asia to help lower the cost of sale and to amplify the acquisition of net new customers. Given the relative newness of the team and the extent of their addressable opportunity, it was felt that coaching would be a good investment to build their self- awareness, self-discipline and raise their execution quotient to achieve their results.
We designed a coaching engagement that brought together the best of our experience, in coaching sales managers across the globe. There were three specific areas of focus that helped the managers over deliver on their aspirational commitment for the fiscal:
- Plan for adequate number of coaching sessions (15 sessions over a period of nine months), to help the managers truly appreciate and absorb the power of coaching.
- Balance the coaching sessions equally between the appreciation of coaching and the application of coaching.
- Identify individual, team, and organizational challenges that the coachee could effectively apply their coaching skills to, which included their customer and their partner as well.
The entire market area across Asia over delivered on their commitment for the fiscal. They were conscious that their appreciation and application of coaching helped create bonding and aspiration within their teams that still sustains their collective passion for excellence.
Customer Engagement Testimonial
Recommended Resources for Coaching Your Team.
