I enjoyed speaking on a panel during the recent Sales 3.0 Conference on various topics, focusing on improving forecast accuracy.
The tips provided leverage the concepts of Revenue Enablement. Revenue Enablement supports prospects and customers along their journey by enabling all customer-facing roles to deliver consistently great information and experiences to ensure customers identify and overcome their business challenges positively and measurably.
Revenue Enablement takes a broad view and, in so doing, creates higher value for buyers and customers and creates more predictability for businesses.
Sales Processes, Methodologies, Training, and Coaching
Your team needs to follow a consistent set of processes, and a single methodology, to ensure that consistently great conversations—leading to a thorough understanding of your customer’s needs—occur every time.
However, defining a set of processes and stating that you are following a particular methodology doesn’t accomplish anything. Your teams must understand why these systems exist, how to properly use them, and what benefits they will see as a result.
How do you accomplish this?
Train the team on the why, how, and what
Anyone can deliver one training session covering these topics, butone training session will not get the job done.
To overcome information entropy, you must build reinforcement into the process. Use reminders (via email, text, Slack, etc.) to spotlight a key why, how, or what message.
Use coaching to custom-tailor training the to individual and their situation
Why is coaching so important?
When done well, coaching takes the high-level information provided during training and custom-tailors that information for each individual and the situation they seek to apply it.
For example, if the training focused on running a useful sales discovery, your sales managers would need to coach individual sellers on applying the information in their daily lives. The manager and seller could sit down, flesh out what they are hoping to learn during the next conversation, and jointly develop a plan for that conversation. During this session, the manager would coach the individual on applying new training tips to this situation.
Yes, coaching has become more challenging in a remote-work environment, but there is no excuse. I wrote about the challenges around remote sales coaching previously and would encourage you to check out those tips.
Build checkpoints into your CRM
At Bigtincan, we include capturing critical data—like that associated with our standardized discovery process—directly into our CRM system. This integrated approach allows us to understand better the likelihood of closing a deal and avoid a “happy ears” approach to forecasting.
Providing contextually relevant information
We are overwhelmed by the amount of information flung at us by well-intentioned people inside our businesses. We are drowning in the waves of information that surge at us from the outside world.
We must provide our teammates with just-in-time, right-in-context methods to access the information they need—when they need it.
Put as much thought into the delivery mechanisms as you put into the content, training, and coaching insights you provide your teams.
It will pay off.
Final thoughts
The price of not improving forecast accuracy is too high, from negatively impacting stock prices and team bonuses, to complete business failure.
Revenue and Sales Enablement can help you overcome these challenges—are you leveraging them to overcome these business challenges?
Download our Essential Guide to Sales Enablement to learn more.
This post is by John Moore, The Collaborator. John is the VP of Revenue Enablement at Bigtincan and Founder of Coffee, Collaboration, and Enablement. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
