Mike is an award-winning sales and marketing thought leader with 30 years of experience in global high-tech companies. He has held leadership positions in sales, sales operations, and marketing with proven success in growing revenue while increasing sales productivity and performance.
Sales leaders must look at multiple data indicators to get a full picture of productivity. Forrester Index benchmark data reveals that many sales organizations are expected to deliver double-digit year-over-year growth. Understanding productivity data is a first step, but sales, and sales operations leaders must drive effective change management to make an impact. In this report, we discuss our findings on sales productivity within B2B sales organizations, and describe why sales leaders should adopt an innovative approach to analyzing sales productivity.
Sales activity studies generate evidence about how sales resources are spending their time and the impact these activities have on sales results. These studies shouldn’t be limited to individual sales reps; an examination of their surrounding support system must be included. By focusing on what various sales roles are doing as individuals, and the ways in which they are collectively supported by the organization, organizations can gain a complete view of where reps are spending their time and why. In this report, we examine the concept of a sales activity study, link it to sales productivity, and discuss common pitfalls to avoid when conducting the study.
As the point person for revenue growth, the B2B sales leader is under constant pressure to deliver revenue results against corporate goals. But sales leaders historically have lacked a way to clearly communicate the standards that they’ve implemented to generate scalable revenue growth, and they haven’t had access to data to analyze how they’re doing. This report provides sales leaders with a sales operating model that allows them to communicate their programmatic approach to corporate leadership and show data that reveals problems so that corrective action can be taken.
B2B chief sales officers (CSOs) are increasingly being asked to build a predictable and consistent sales engine that ensures the long-term health of the business. A spectrum of metrics, including pipeline coverage ratios, conversion rates, and win rates, can help CSOs improve and maintain the health of the pipeline. Top-down pipeline health management reduces the risk of missing quarterly revenue targets and increases the ability to manage discounts or concessions offered late in a quarter. In this report, we identify pipeline health management processes that CSOs must lead to deliver predictable, consistent, lasting business results.
Business development reps (BDRs) are responsible for outbound prospecting and handing off opportunities to sales for further development. BDRs are the often the first people to interact with prospect accounts, so enabling them for success can open the door for a dramatic increase in opportunities for the organization and enhance BDRs’ career paths. In this report, we define basic, intermediate, and advanced competencies across the two core disciplines of the business development role — developing new business relationships, and teleservices research.
B2B sales leaders, who set their organization’s sales strategy and position their teams for success, rely on metrics to benchmark and optimize the performance of their teams as they race to exceed their quotas. In this report, we present data-driven insights on what high performance looks like for the six operating standards within the Sales Operating Model, as well as guidance on how to prioritize actions to improve sales performance.
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