During my three decades in sales leadership roles at large enterprises, early-stage growth companies, and my management consulting practice, I have witnessed and corrected many bad sales practices. These practices, if not course-corrected, would lead to zero sales. When they numbered an even ten, they became Sherwin’s 10 Deadly Sins of Sales. Out of the office with senior executives, I would recount them to their great amusement.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/shutterstock_2138875859-scaled.jpg15752560Sherwin Uretskyhttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngSherwin Uretsky2024-01-21 09:09:042024-02-26 11:01:30Sherwin’s 10 Deadly Sins of Sales
Revenue only comes from one place – the customer. Too often, companies don’t fully consider the complete revenue picture when pursuing their revenue growth agenda. This post reinforces the importance of taking an end-to-end customer lifecycle and full-funnel perspective to create and optimize a comprehensive revenue architecture.
https://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.png00John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2023-03-23 12:51:142024-01-23 15:10:53The Flywheel Effect in Customer Lifecycle Marketing Sales and Service
A typical priority in revenue growth transformation and Revenue Architecture design is getting to the next level of Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement effectiveness. Quite often, companies come to us with what they perceive as a “marketing execution” issue. When we dig a little deeper in a Diagnostic, it often becomes clear that while there are always improvement opportunity in the mechanics of marketing execution, core issues often revolve around a broader view of buyer engagement strategy.
For better demand generation performance, it is helpful to validate your buyer engagement strategy by answering these 3 central questions and following these 9 best practices:
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shutterstock_1739865149.png20854710John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2022-03-21 15:15:502022-03-25 13:20:319 Best Practices for Demand Generation and Buyer Engagement
This article is periodically updated. It was originally published in 2013.
Your LinkedIn profile is an outpost for your personal brand. For many, it takes the place of a website. It is a landing page you can manage and share your professional background, positions, experiences and achievements. A LinkedIn profile often takes the place of a resume or CV. We used to think of LinkedIn as the online resume. While it remains important for job seekers and recruiters, it is now a powerful business social network.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/shutterstock_1693684861.png28087000John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2021-12-17 05:05:022021-12-28 14:52:42LinkedIn Set Up and Automated Prospecting Tools
We left transactional sales behind in the 90s. With recurring business models like ‘as-a-service’, we need to rethink the “sales process” from the traditional vertical funnel to a bow tie funnel that recognizes the role of the post-sale customer execution in revenue realization. We need a full-funnel approach. Predictable, sustainable, and accelerated revenue performance relies increasingly on the customer realizing benefits and impacts from a product or service.
The universe of markets and buyers are incredibly diverse and your decisions about where and whom to target can make or break your revenue performance. A company can’t be all things to all buyers in all markets. As the competitive landscape is always changing, with more players vying for prospects’ time and attention, it is vital to select markets where you can effectively compete and win then continuously segment the market to isolate specific audiences to engage at the right time and right place with the right message.
Enterprise funnel math exercises help align marketing and sales teams by zeroing in on critical funnel metrics like Sales and Marketing Qualified Inquiries (e.g. MQI) and Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (MQL and SQL).
An enterprise funnel math model can help you identify the mix of tactics for for different funnel characteristics. For example, a sales-driven funnel might be designed with sales-led prospection activities and ABM tactics. A high volume lead gen funnel might be driven by Inbound Marketing or Paid SEM. Each funnel will have its own “DNA” and can be modeled top to bottom across deal stages to inform go-to-market strategies and budgeting.
Defining Your Funnels
A simple spreadsheet can help you produce a flexible working model that can be tailored to each company. To make it work, it is important to identify the right funnels or segments. The more granular your funnels are, the more accurate the funnel model will be – but too many funnels will add complexity. So, we typically identify 4-8 segments that represent distinct marketing and sales motions. Select segment that have a distinctive “funnel DNA” – not necessarily a P&L, or a geography segment. Often a funnel is centered around a product or service offering. Funnels can always be rolled up into geos, or P&Ls.
Buyers want an efficient, effective, quality buying experience. They don’t consider whether their experience is “marketing-generated” or “sales-generated”. They choose if they want to engage with your web content, 3rd party digital outposts or marketplaces or with your sales people. They most likely will interact with all of these in different sequences and in unstructured and unpredictable ways. Buyer engagement efforts take place all along the buyer journey and to deliver the experiences buyers expect and maximize your revenue impact, you need an integrated marketing and sales process.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/shutterstock_1084312901.png5001200John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2020-12-21 10:27:232021-12-24 20:21:49Integrated Marketing and Sales Process
We have written a few articles about collaborative qualification and how to select and apply the right sales qualification tools – including SCOTSMAN and BANT. These tools are quite familiar to B2B sales and teams that focused on a considered sale. Yet, we see some challenges:
As clients are self-selling on websites, they will pre-qualify (assuming they find buying content on the website). This changes the role of sales-led qualification.
BANT is a proven model, but the focus is on qualification from the seller perspective, it works better to qualify OUT the opportunity rather than qualify IN the opportunity. It does not help build a collaborative relationship with the client. It is confrontational.
SCOTSMAN is another great model as it offers a nuanced approach, but it is hard to remember each of the elements in the mnemonic on the fly. Sales reps may need to pull out a cheat sheet which can be difficult in the heat of the moment. ( See our other post on BANT and Scotsman to learn more. )
So what is the right approach to sales qualification? We suggest a collaborative approach using FACT.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/shutterstock_1030959718.png10002000John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2020-10-24 15:55:352021-12-24 20:20:55Sales Qualification Tools using FACT instead of BANT and SCOTSMAN
As growth focused companies realize the critical synergies required across the marketing, sales and customer success functions, they are increasingly recruiting a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to lead the way. Yet many CROs fail without a properly defined role and an adequate onboarding process. It is vital to ensure CRO success.
A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is responsible for a company’s revenue streams. He/she has the ultimate accountability for driving revenue growth. The role is clearly cross functional. The CRO oversees and aligns revenue-generating departments: Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. It is a challenging role. The average tenure of a Chief Revenue officer working at the same company is incredibly brief – only about 18 months, according to an annual survey from CSO Insights.
The first 90 days are critical – Whether a company makes money rests with the CRO. Expectations are that the CRO will have about one quarter or 90 days to prove they can meet management’s expectations. As Michael Watkins points out in his top selling book The First 90 Days.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/shutterstock_1311556100.png8331875John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2020-08-14 15:44:402020-10-26 12:55:47Chief Revenue Officer Success – The First 90 Days