“Nothing happens until a sale is made.”
– Thomas J. Watson
There is one fundamental truth in business growth, and it applies irrespective of the company or industry: In order to grow the organization you ultimately have to increase sales.
Not every organization is ready for growth, but those that are quickly discover there are many variables. It is often difficult to know which strategies and tactics to consider both individually and collectively.
In this article, I will share ten of my favorite strategies to accelerate your sales and drive growth. Some of these may be surprising, but they have proven to be successful in organizations I have been involved with, and I am confident they can work for you too.
But first, an important reminder…
Four Sales Growth Levers
Every go-to-market tactic (and there are many) has a common objective; namely to directly, or indirectly, improve sales results.
There are ultimately only four sales growth levers, which enable any sales tactic to work. Despite the vast number of options and the many complexities of executing growth tactics, it is possible to map each one of them back to one of the following four principles:
- Increase the number of clients. Identifying and turning more prospects into new paying clients.
- Increase the average transaction. Getting each prospect or client to spend more at each purchase.
- Increase the frequency that the average client buys from you. Getting each client to buy from you more often.
- Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of each step in the marketing and sales process. Driving greater “funnel velocity” and conversion throughout the buyer’s journey.
In the sections that follow, I will share ten proven strategies that leverage one or more of these core principles to accelerate your sales.
1 – Appoint a (Competent) Growth Leader
I often talk to clients about getting the right team on the bus. The most important one is the bus driver!
In order to execute a strategic growth plan successfully, you will need a proven growth leader. This individual needs to “own” the development of growth strategy, and the subsequent execution of the plan.
A weak, or non-existent, growth leader will doom the growth plan from the start.
It might be the head of growth, or the VP of sales, or the Chief Marketing Officer. The title is ultimately less important than having a leader responsible for driving the growth agenda for the organization.
2 – Fire Your Worst Sales Rep (Immediately)
Sales teams tend to follow a bell curve of performance. A few high performers, the majority in the acceptable but not stellar middle, and then the bottom of the pile. There is almost always someone bringing up the rear.
Growth leaders should quickly get rid of those underperformers who are incompetent in their role or just coasting along. They are a drag on the entire organization.
Underperformers come with a huge cost. They always consume a disproportionate amount of management time. They usually cause resentment and friction in the team. If allowed to fester long enough, they become a cancer that can literally destroy a sales organization from the inside out.
Competent growth leaders clean house quickly and get the right team on the bus that they are driving.
A new growth leader should make a top-to-bottom review of the sales team a top priority. Provided they truly are much worse than the rest of the team, fire your worst sales rep as soon as possible.
Not only does this send a strong message to the rest of the team about establishing a performance culture, it also makes logical sense. Your organization is probably investing significant marketing resources generating leads. Don’t waste valuable leads on underperforming sales reps. Give them to those who have proven they can close deals.
Invest your newfound extra management time in making your best sales reps even better.
3 – Know Your Target (Deeply)
One of the most significant, and often overlooked, leverage points when developing go-to-market strategy is to define your sales target.
Many startups struggle with this, and it is very common for more established organizations too.
What do I mean by “know your target”?
The logic behind this recommendation is straightforward – every individual (for a B2C company) or every organization (for a B2B company) cannot be your target. You need focus in order to be successful. Without focus, your messaging will flounder in the marketplace, and your team will waste a lot of precious time and energy chasing bad deals.
If you are very clear on your target then you the luxury of just focusing your marketing and sales teams on those targets.
Based on analysis of existing customers, and researching the market, most organizations are able to create a definition of their best target with a little bit of effort.
In marketing circles, this is called an Ideal Client Profile (ICP). Knowing your ICP provides a great target for lead generation, it also helps to refine the value proposition and messaging into tailored language that will appeal specifically to that ICP.
4 – Understand (and Respect) the Buyer’s Journey
The vast majority of sales organizations get this topic completely wrong.
Most sales teams force prospects into their pre-defined sales process and pipeline stages. Why do they do this? Sometimes it is based on implementing a trendy sales methodology, or a model the head of sales brought with them from their prior company. More often than not, it is simply because it is the way they have always done things and nobody has bothered to ask one simple question…
“How do buyers want to buy?”
By asking this simple, yet profound question, a sales organization can begin to map their buyer’s journey. Once you know your buyer’s journey, you can then align this to your sales process instead of force fitting your sales process onto the buyer.
If you put your “buyer cap” on this makes sense, right?
Once you understand the buying process of your prospects, you can then help them move along that path. Providing potential buyers with the right amount of content and sales interactions, at the right time, will accelerate your sales.
This will also make it easier to buy from your organization. A great technique for growth leaders is to put yourself in the buyer’s seat. Attach yourself to the buyer’s journey from lead stage all the way to a closed-won client. At every step try to remove friction, strive to make it easier to buy from you. Some common areas of opportunity: your collateral, your website, your pricing, your contracting process, implementation and startup, etc.
5 – (Make Sure) Marketing Enables Sales
Unfortunately, it is all too common to discover a dysfunctional relationship between marketing and sales within organizations who desire growth.
This broken dynamic is often blamed on poor delivery, but I think the issue goes deeper. It is the direct result of poor alignment and bad communication between the two groups.
In any effective go-to-market organization, marketing enables sales.
How does a growth leader make sure this happens? By creating metrics and accountability that both marketing and sales agree upon.
If the sales team thinks all the leads they get from marketing are crap (a very common complaint) then have them create a definition of a lead which they will gladly accept. This becomes the new standard.
If the marketing team thinks sales does not invest enough time in the good leads they receive (also a common criticism) then have them define the minimum threshold of activity for accepted leads, and build a process to nurture those leads that are not ready or those that are rejected.
Removing all the friction between marketing and sales can have a dramatic impact on sales performance.
A nice side benefit of this increased collaboration is better market feedback for the marketing team to use in developing content and refining messaging.
6 – Increase Your Prices (for New Customers)
Pricing is one of the most complicated, and often neglected, components of a growth strategy. Getting it right involves as much art as it does science.
Here is a radical suggestion: Increase your prices by 10-20% for new customers starting today.
Just like that. Boom!
You can always discount back down to yesterday’s list price, but at the very least, you have set the negotiation bar higher.
Raising prices on existing customers introduces significantly more risk, and should only be considered after careful deliberation. Smart organizations build pre-negotiated increases into their contracts, or at the very least have a well-rehearsed narrative that justifies the increase (greater costs, significantly more value, etc.)
Raising your prices is much easier if your product/service is good, and differentiated, and delivers real value to your customers…
7 – If You Don’t Know (Ask Your Customers)
When they attempt to charge more, some growth leaders discover their organization does not have much pricing power. They wake up to the realization that their product(s)/service(s) are in a commodity position with many alternative options for buyers.
These leaders need to revisit their differentiation and value proposition in order to make it more distinctive and valuable.
If you don’t know what else your customer wants, or even why they buy from you, get out of the building and ask them. You will be surprised at how honest customers will be if you ask them questions like this.
When you get back to the office, share these insights with your team and encourage them to bake them into what they do. This will help to improve your messaging, your sales, and ultimately your ability to charge more.
8 – Fire Your Worst Customer (Really)
When I am talking to CEO’s and growth leaders this next recommendation is always more controversial than firing your worst sales rep. Here it is:
Fire your worst customer.
I readily admit it is counter-intuitive to fire a paying customer in order to increase sales, but hear me out.
This highly symbolic move can have a long-lasting impact on your organization. Here’s why…
When you are out talking to customers, also pay attention to your support team and your financials. It really helps if you have profitability data at a customer level. What you will likely discover is your worst customer(s) come with a significantly higher service cost…often negating their contribution to the bottom line.
These customers cause stress, employee turnover, extra work-around processes, and many other bad support dynamics. Getting them off your books will send a message to your internal team that they are valued.
It will also send a message to your sales team…
I’m not saying this is true for your organization, but I have definitely seen sales reps (who are keen to make their numbers) chase after deals with customers they know are going to be a problem down the road. Firing a bad customer will reinforce to your sales team that there is a model for what a good and profitable customer should look like.
There is nothing more liberating (and symbolic to the team) than to cull a bad customer from the roster.
9 – Institute a Monthly Quota (Not Annual or Quarterly)
There is nothing like well thought out metrics to drive desired behavior in sales teams.
The metric most often discussed with sales teams is their sales quota. Unfortunately, this usually comes out of an annual budgeting process and is, by default, often expressed as an annual target number.
This is a mistake. Why? It is too far out in the distance to keep the attention of most sales reps. Smart growth leaders implement monthly sales quotas, not quarterly or annual ones.
Why is this important? Annual quotas are too far removed; they do not shine enough heat and light on immediate sales activity. Quarterly quotas take most of the pressure off sales reps for the first two months of the quarter.
I have heard pushback on this topic from sales teams who claim they have a longer sales cycle and/or high-ticket products/services, and therefore this does not work for them. The complaint is they have a low volume of transactions that cannot be measured monthly. That is fine. If this is the case for your organization, then consider measuring interim activity metrics that you have proven will ultimately result in sales quota achievement.
10 – Invest in Client Success (No Matter What Your Business)
This suggestion applies to any business, and is quite possibly the best idea of them all.
Here’s the logic: Depending on whose research you believe, and the industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Furthermore, the consulting firm Bain found that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
If you help your customers to optimize and better use what they have purchased from you, then they will return the favor in the form of loyalty. The payback in terms of renewals, referrals, upsells, and lifetime value can be huge.
The best part is you don’t need to invest more in marketing and sales, you just need to keep more of the business you have already sold.
Sales Is the Fuel for Your Growth
Growth leaders ultimately must increase sales in order to achieve their organizational growth objectives. What makes growth strategy interesting and exciting is that every organization and market is different, and the levers to increase sales are different for each unique situation.
The proven strategies and tactics in this article have worked for me, and the organizations I have been involved with during my career as a growth strategist. My expectation is that some, if not all, of them can also work in your organization.
As always, please share your feedback, and feel free to give me a call if I can help.
-Onward
About the author: Kimball Norup is the founder of 1CMO Consulting, a business strategy and growth advisory firm based in Sonoma, California. To read prior articles, or sign up to receive future ones by email, click here.
