3 Steps to Make Your Sales Strategy Actionable

[image error]We’ve just hit the mid-year mark, a time when, for many companies, the planning process begins for 2013.  However, in many sales organizations, the plan takes a back seat to the here-and-now.  With all the pressing demands from customers, as well as requests from internal stakeholders, we tend to throw our strategic priorities aside just to stay above water.

It almost feels like someone has pulled a fire alarm.  One member shared with us that over three quarters, sales had received requests to fulfill 77 priorities – that’s a new priority almost every other business day!

So what can be done?  How we can focus our organization only on the most important tasks and priorities?

The key is limiting your sales organization’s priorities, and then building metrics to track progress against those priorities.  Here is a quick, three step process to filter all the things your organization could be doing down to what they need to be doing:  

Step 1:  Filter out by alignment with corporate strategy – does the initiative help you achieve corporate objectives (I bet you can get rid of more than half the things sales is asked to do here…)?


Step 2:  Filter by alignment with sales strategy – do the remaining items help you achieve your sales goals?  This can include a number of sub-filters, including:

Alignment with existing customer segmentation
Sales force capabilities
Sales force capacity (note this is different from capability, and needs to be asked in addition.  It’s good if your sales force can do these things – but do they have the time?)




Step 3: Filter by financial impact – at this point you likely have a pretty good list of targeted priorities – now we need to ensure we get paid for them.

So now you have a small number of true priorities for your organization to pursue.  I would encourage you to go one step further by assigning metrics and goals to track progress against those priorities at the individual, team, and organizational levels.  As we all know, what gets measured gets done.  And by placing concrete outcomes against these priorities, it will help to focus your organization on executing against them.

Additionally, to help members with priority setting, we’ve created a 15-minute, leadership-oriented survey to help members prioritize internal investments and activities.  This survey leverages our Anatomy of a World-Class Sales Organization to help members focus on the top 2-4 areas that are most in need of investment.  (SEC Members, if you are interested in leveraging this, see these instructions for how to launch the survey in your organization.)

Managing requests that compete for time and investments is a fact of life in sales.  They key to success in this environment is honing down the list of things you and your team could be doing, to those things that you need to be doing.

SEC Members, for more information on the planning and filtering process, see this example of a Strategy Prioritization Toolkit from Schneider Electric or learn more about Toyota’s Problem Reframing Process, which ensures priority setting efforts are aimed at solving the correct problems.